Love and sex attraction being the chief objects in the lives of a considerable part of mankind, it is surprising that until recently sexuality was not looked upon with great favor, and that a sane knowledge of sex and reproduction was assiduously withheld from the people. While our ancestors considered the sex functions sacred, by a strange mental process it is now considered shameful. So deeply is the sense of shame morbidly associated with the sensual desire that most people, and especially women, frequently disavow their propensity and attempt to hide their ardor from the world. They do not recognize that normal, well-ordered amativeness is a physiological and moral virtue, while manifestations of spurious spirituality are often induced by certain perversions. Indifference to amatory pleasures is frequently professed by those who resort to artificial stimulants. Only those most occupied with amatory delights feign to look with contempt upon sex and to despise its wonderful functions.[B] To the really innocent and pure all things are pure. The result of this morbid sense of shame is that there is scarcely any other subject so completely ignored as the sex function, although so much of the health and happiness of the race depends upon it. This false sense of shame is the cause of our modern fig-leaf modesty and prudery, which attributes a particular obscene meaning to everything sexual. It has created that diseased imagination, depraved beyond all hope, which can find any prurient gratification in the cold, chaste nakedness of ancient marble. The mere nude arms or legs of a small school girl, the furnishings of a public bath-house, the naked limbs of a Tirolian peasant, or the grandest works of art awaken in them lascivious thoughts. Individuals with such traits are accustomed to interject their own diseased imagination, guilty conscience and obscene sentiments into the purest artistic creations, be they sculptured, painted, written or spoken. The prudery and obscenity of these victims of a diseased imagination and perverted moral sense have succeeded in distorting our judgment on questions of sex in such a way that any desire for scientific instruction in these subjects has become inextricably confused with ideas of prurience and impropriety. Matters pertaining to the generative functions are, as a rule, excluded even from treatises on physiology. But for the anatomists and alienists, nothing would be known about the physiology of normal Love. The zealots wish to persuade us that the population of the earth increases by the stork-method.