Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions. R. de Graef in the Preface to his famous treatise on the generative organs of women, _De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus_, dedicated to Cosmo III de Medici in 1672, considered it necessary to apologize for the subject of his work. Even a century later, Linnæus in his great work, _The System of Nature_, dismissed as "abominable" the exact study of the female genitals, although he admitted the scientific interest of such investigations. And if men of science have found it difficult to attain an objective vision of women we cannot be surprised that medieval and still more ancient conceptions have often been subtly mingled with the views of philosophical and semi-philosophical writers.[47] We may regard as a special variety of the ascetic view of sex,--for the ascetics, as we see, freely but not quite legitimately, based their asceticism largely on æsthetic considerations,--that insistence on the proximity of the sexual to the excretory centres which found expression in the early Church in Augustine's depreciatory assertion: "Inter fæces et urinam nascimur," and still persists among many who by no means always associate it with religious asceticism.[48] "As a result of what ridiculous economy, and of what Mephistophilian irony," asks Tarde,[49] "has Nature imagined that a function so lofty, so worthy of the poetic and philosophical hymns which have celebrated it, only deserved to have its exclusive organ shared with that of the vilest corporal functions?" It may, however, be pointed out that this view of the matter, however unconsciously, is itself the outcome of the ascetic depreciation of the body. From a scientific point of view, the metabolic processes of the body from one end to the other, whether regarded chemically or psychologically, are all interwoven and all of equal dignity. We cannot separate out any particular chemical or biological process and declare: This is vile. Even what we call excrement still stores up the stuff of our lives. Eating has to some persons seemed a disgusting process. But yet it has been possible to say, with Thoreau, that "the gods have really intended that men should feed divinely, as themselves, on their own nectar and ambrosia.... I have felt that eating became a sacrament, a method of communion, an ecstatic exercise, and a sitting at the communion table of the world."