The latter is the case with those for whom life has been all autumn, since they were born withered; women and men who have been seized with a hatred of the conditions of procreation because they have been the victims of those vices and sufferings which still make of erotics the _Divina Commedia_ of earthly life; but not as in that of Dante an architectonic arrangement of hell, heaven, and purgatory, giving them a definite sequence in space and time, but a drama wherein the three states break in upon one another like waves on the shore. But whether the haters of sexual life belong to the exhausted or to the excluded, to the sterile or to the immature, the withered or the poisoned, they may doubtless be entitled individually to more or less leniency; their doctrine of morality, however, must for the reasons we have given, be rejected as entirely worthless. The same holds good of those who solve the sexual problem as though it were one with the claim of individual liberty, irrespective of any consideration for the race. These latter are in the habit of comparing the right to satisfy sexual desire with the right to satisfy hunger. The former, on the other hand, reject this comparison as untenable, since, of course, a person can live healthily in lifelong sexual abstinence. Instead of it they compare the erotic passion with other passions, such as gambling and drunkenness, in which popular opinion recommends self-control and the will is capable of it. Both regard the question in an equally superficial way. To compare the fundamental conditions of natural life, the motive forces of civilised life, love and hunger, with any other passion than each other, falsifies the whole statement of the problem. The instinct of love, as that of hunger, may to a certain extent be suppressed; in both cases an increase of strength in a certain direction may incidentally be gained. But both needs must be satisfied in the right way if the individual being and the human race are to live and fulfil the intention of life in a higher development. Fasting men in the question of love are of as little value to the enhancement of life as they are in other fields. Christianity has so accustomed us to treat sexual purity as a question of the individual that, whether we regard it from the point of view of the enthusiast for chastity or from that of the enthusiast for liberty, we do not perceive that, while one satisfies hunger to prolong one’s own life, one produces children to prolong that of the race. This renders the ascetic talk about the innocuousness of abstinence as superficial as the alleged right to satisfy sexual desire with the same freedom as hunger.