It is undoubtedly deplorable. It involves the introduction of an artificiality into a real natural order. Love is real and positive; chastity is real and positive. But sexual abstinence is unreal and negative, in the strict sense perhaps impossible. The underlying feelings of all those who have emphasized its importance is that a physiological process can be good or bad according as it is or is not carried out under certain arbitrary external conditions, which render it licit or illicit. An act of sexual intercourse under the name of "marriage" is beneficial; the very same act, under the name of "incontinence," is pernicious. No physiological process, and still less any spiritual process, can bear such restriction. It is as much as to say that a meal becomes good or bad, digestible or indigestible, according as a grace is or is not pronounced before the eating of it. It is deplorable because, such a conception being essentially unreal, an element of unreality is thus introduced into a matter of the gravest concern alike to the individual and to society. Artificial disputes have been introduced where no matter of real dispute need exist. A contest has been carried on marked by all the ferocity which marks contests about metaphysical or pseudo-metaphysical differences having no concrete basis in the actual world. As will happen in such cases, there has, after all, been no real difference between the disputants because the point they quarreled over was unreal. In truth each side was right and each side was wrong. It is necessary, we see, that the balance should be held even. An absolute license is bad; an absolute abstinence--even though some by nature or circumstances are urgently called to adopt it--is also bad. They are both alike away from the gracious equilibrium of Nature. And the force, we see, which naturally holds this balance even is the biological fact that the act of sexual union is the satisfaction of the erotic needs, not of one person, but of two persons. FOOTNOTES: [92] This view was an ambiguous improvement on the view, universally prevalent, as Westermarck has shown, among primitive peoples, that the sexual act involves indignity to a woman or depreciation of her only in so far as she is the property of another person who is the really injured party. [93] This implicit contradiction has been acutely pointed out from the religious side by the Rev. H. Northcote, _Christianity and Sex Problems_, p. 53. [94] It has already been necessary to discuss this point briefly in "The Sexual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these _Studies_. [95] "Die Abstinentia Sexualis," _Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Nov., 1908. [96] P. Janet, "La Maladie du Scrupule," _Revue Philosophique_, May, 1901.