When we have put the problem on this negative basis of abstinence it is difficult to see how we can dispute the justice of Freud's conclusions. They hold good equally for abstinence from food and abstinence from sexual love. When we have placed the problem on a more positive basis, and are able to invoke the more active and fruitful motives of asceticism and chastity this unfortunate fight against a natural impulse is abolished. If chastity is an ideal of the harmonious play of all the organic impulses of the soul and body, if asceticism, properly understood, is the athletic striving for a worthy object which causes, for the time, an indifference to the gratification of sexual impulses, we are on wholesome and natural ground, and there is no waste of energy in fruitless striving for a negative end, whether imposed artificially from without, as it usually is, or voluntarily chosen by the individual himself. For there is really no complete analogy between sexual desire and hunger, between abstinence from sexual relations and abstinence from food. When we put them both on the basis of abstinence we put them on a basis which covers the impulse for food but only half covers the impulse for sexual love. We confer no pleasure and no service on our food when we eat it. But the half of sexual love, perhaps the most important and ennobling half, lies in what we give and not in what we take. To reduce this question to the low level of abstinence, is not only to centre it in a merely negative denial but to make it a solely self-regarding question. Instead of asking: How can I bring joy and strength to another? we only ask: How can I preserve my empty virtue? Therefore it is that from whatever aspect we consider the question,--whether in view of the flagrant contradiction between the authorities who have discussed this question, or of the illegitimate mingling here of moral and physiological considerations, or of the merely negative and indeed unnatural character of the "virtue" thus set up, or of the failure involved to grasp the ennoblingly altruistic and mutual side of sexual love,--from whatever aspect we approach the problem of "sexual abstinence" we ought only to agree to do so under protest.