In thus understanding asceticism and chastity, and their beneficial functions in life, we see that they occupy a place midway between the artificially exaggerated position they once held and that to which they were degraded by the inevitable reaction of total indifference or actual hostility which followed. Asceticism and chastity are not rigid categorical imperatives; they are useful means to desirable ends; they are wise and beautiful arts. They demand our estimation, but not our over-estimation. For in over-estimating them, it is too often forgotten, we over-estimate the sexual instinct. The instinct of sex is indeed extremely important. Yet it has not that all-embracing and supereminent importance which some, even of those who fight against it, are accustomed to believe. That artificially magnified conception of the sexual impulse is fortified by the artificial emphasis placed upon asceticism. We may learn the real place of the sexual impulse in learning how we may reasonably and naturally view the restraints on that impulse. FOOTNOTES: [69] For Blake and for Shelley, as well as, it may be added, for Hinton, chastity, as Todhunter remarks in his _Study of Shelley_, is "a type of submission to the actual, a renunciation of the infinite, and is therefore hated by them. The chaste man, i.e., the man of prudence and self-control, is the man who has lost the nakedness of his primitive innocence." [70] For evidence of the practices of savages in this matter, see Appendix _A_ to the third volume of these _Studies_, "The Sexual Instinct in Savages." Cf. also Chs. IV and VII of Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_, and also Chs. XXXVIII and XLI of the same author's _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii; Frazer's _Golden Bough_ contains much bearing on this subject, as also Crawley's _Mystic Rose_. [71] See, e.g., Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii, pp. 412 et seq. [72] Thus an old Maori declared, a few years ago, that the decline of his race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in the _tabu_. "For," said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), "in the olden-time our _tapu_ ramified the whole social system. The head, the hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the _tohungas_ proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded. Who nowadays thinks of the sacredness of the head? See when the kettle boils, the young man jumps up, whips the cap off his head, and uses it for a kettle-holder. Who nowadays but looks on with indifference when the barber of the village, if he be near the fire, shakes the loose hair off his cloth into it, and the joke and the laughter goes on as if no sacred operation had just been concluded. Food is consumed on places which, in bygone days, it dared not even be carried over."