[63] Hinton well illustrates this feeling. "We call by the name of lust," he declares in his MSS., "the most simple and natural desires. We might as well term hunger and thirst 'lust' as so call sex-passion, when expressing simply Nature's prompting. We miscall it 'lust,' cruelly libelling those to whom we ascribe it, and introduce absolute disorder. For, by foolishly confounding Nature's demands with lust, we insist upon restraint upon her." [64] Several centuries earlier another French writer, the distinguished physician, A. Laurentius (Des Laurens) in his _Historia Anatomica Humani Corporis_ (lib. viii, Quæstio vii) had likewise puzzled over "the incredible desire of coitus," and asked how it was that "that divine animal, full of reason and judgment, which we call Man, should be attracted to those obscene parts of women, soiled with filth, which are placed, like a sewer, in the lowest part of the body." It is noteworthy that, from the first, and equally among men of religion, men of science, and men of letters, the mystery of this problem has peculiarly appealed to the French mind. [65] Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, vol. ii, pp. 608 et seq. [66] "Perhaps there is scarcely a man," wrote Malthus, a clergyman as well as one of the profoundest thinkers of his day (_Essay on the Principle of Population_, 1798, Ch. XI), "who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again. The superiority of intellectual to sexual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiate, than in their being more real and essential." [67] The whole argument of the fourth volume of these _Studies_, on "Sexual Selection in Man," points in this direction. [68] "Perhaps most average men," Forel remarks (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 307), "are but slightly receptive to the intoxication of love; they are at most on the level of the _gourmet_, which is by no means necessarily an immoral plane, but is certainly not that of poetry." CHAPTER V. THE FUNCTION OF CHASTITY.