Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to SocietyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
H.G. Wells (in _A Modern Utopia_), pointing out the importance of
chastity, though rejecting celibacy, invokes, like Jules de
Gaultier, the motive of pride. "Civilization has developed far
more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural
perfection of security, liberty, and abundance our civilization
has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to
excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and
too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than
his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and
to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of
training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. Our
founders organized motives from all sorts of sources, but I think
the chief force to give men self-control is pride. Pride may not
be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the best king there,
for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and
sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they
held no appetite must be glutted, no appetite must have
artificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be
starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not
replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire
for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our founders' ideal.
They enjoined marriage between equals as the duty to the race,
and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that
uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality, that sometimes
reduces a couple of people to something jointly less than
either."
With regard to chastity as an element of erotic satisfaction,
Edward Carpenter writes (_Love's Coming of Age_, p. 11): "There
is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which
a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it
instantly snatches the same, and destroys in a few moments the
form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full
glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who
is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of
life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body,
and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into
the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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