The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of the virtue of chastity in its modern sense. The command: "Be hard," as Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous attitude towards one's self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately accepted ends. "A relative chastity," he wrote, "a fundamental and wise foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[88] In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern movement for the restoration of chastity to its proper place as a real and beneficial virtue, and not a mere empty convention. Such a movement could not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious softness in sexual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction. For erotic satisfaction, in its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the sexual impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls "irradiation," that is to say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism. And that can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and direct gratification of sexual desire, by compelling it to increase its force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole soul as well as the whole body has its part. "Only the chaste can be really obscene," said Huysmans. And on a higher plane, only the chaste can really love. "Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschätzung der Physischen Reinheit," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. ii, Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above primitive conditions. This purity was difficult to preserve in those unsure days; it was rare and unusual. From this rarity rose the superstition of supernatural power residing in the virgin. But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no longer needed to maintain it.... Physical purity can only possess value when it is the result of individual strength of character, and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality."