Sex and Common-SenseRoyden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Philosophy
Sex and Common-Sense
Royden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Marriage; Sex; Sexual ethics
But, you will say, we cannot peer into other people's lives and judge them
in this kind of way. How are we to know? How are we, who have many friends,
many neighbours, on whom our standards must react, to judge their lives?
We can tell who has gone through a legal ceremony and who refuses to do
so. That is a nice convenient rule by which we can judge and condemn such
people. But we cannot go poking into people's lives and studying their
motives and judging their fundamental moral standards! No, you cannot. Why
should you? This little set of iron rules makes it very easy to judge, does
it not? But why do you desire it to be easy to judge? You and I know how
infinite are the gradations between the most noble kind of chastity and
the most ignoble kind of immorality; but which of us is to create a rigid
standard and measure our friends and acquaintances against it? We do not
do it with the other virtues: why do we desire to do it with this one?
Take such a virtue as truth. Conceive the crystalline sincerity of some
truth-loving minds, realize that some have such a devotion to truth that
the faintest shadow of insincerity--not a lie, but the merest shadow of
insincerity in the depths of their hearts--is abhorrent to them. Consider
the infinite gradations between that mind and the mind which takes a lie
for truth, a mind that is rotten with corruption, that does not know how to
think straight, let alone care to speak straight. You do not draw up your
little set of rules and say: "I do not call on that person because he does
not speak the truth; and I won't have anything to do with that one--such
persons are outside the social pale altogether because their conception of
truth is different from mine!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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