The demand for purity which aims at non-sensuousness—or
supersensuousness—may perhaps provide protection from minor dangers.
In great ones it will be as futile as a hedge against a forest
fire. No obstructing of appetites, but only their release in other
directions, can really purify them. Passions can be curbed only by
means of stronger passions. In the same appetite and the same passion
in which the danger lies, in the instinct of love itself, we have the
true starting-point for its ennobling. He to whom the destruction of
this instinct is a passionate desire possesses in this passion itself
a prospect of attaining his unnatural end. He, again, who does not
wish to kill, but only to control the sexual instinct, will become,
in his struggle against this desire—still immeasurably stimulated
through heredity and social custom—a strong and proud conqueror only
when he imagines and finally experiences unity in love. Assuredly also
secondary expedients are to be found. Before all, that of acquiring
the instinct of chastity from parents; of being strengthened and
protected from childhood against the dangers of callousness as well as
those of softness; of being instructed in a refined and gentle way of
the great purpose and great dangers of sexual destiny; of receiving
impressions through public opinion of the possibility of self-control
and its importance to the happiness of the individual himself and of
the race; of avoiding the abuse of means of enjoyment, especially of
intoxicating liquors, which both directly and indirectly weaken the
will-power in the case of sexual, as of all other kinds of, temptation.
It is beyond question that noble sport, dancing, and games—and they
are only noble when practised finely and worthily, with the mind
as well as the body—are a means of replacing and controlling the
sexual instinct. Equally certain is it that bodily and mental labour,
whether undertaken independently or as a participation in some form of
social endeavour, is important as occupying and consuming the sexual
powers in a substituted form. All genuine artistic enjoyment is in
the highest degree important for the ennobling of sexual life. But
all this self-discipline, all these aids from the world of beauty and
labour, all this cultivation of the body to strength and beauty, will
be as lines without a centre so long as they do not all lead in the
direction of love—love, which certain preachers of morality would
leave altogether outside the question, as though even it were a danger
and a temptation. No one would venture to deny that healthy habits
of life and strict self-control may be elevating for the individual,
even if love means nothing in his life. But life in its entirety gains
nothing by the production of hardened or harassed ascetic types, which
by exhausting bodily exercise, by reading that leaves the imagination
arid, and by art that smothers nudity, have succeeded in lulling
to sleep the sensuousness which, nevertheless, will perhaps some
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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