When a difficult problem belonging to the moral world presents itself to us, the only way to resolve it is that of simplifying it by leading it again to the broad highway of physiology. To read and re-read the great book of nature, trying to follow blindly its laws in the human world: there is art. This is manifest at every step in our studies on the sentiment of love. Which are the elements that make a woman seductive above all others? Beauty, grace, affection. Which are the virtues that make a man fascinating above all others? Strength, courage, talent. There is seduction, there is sympathy, which seem the most foolish and the most mysterious things in the world, taken back to the virgin source of the physiology of the sexes; there is an opening through which we see much of the light of future progress. Man must make himself more manly than ever in order to seduce and conquer the love of the daughters of Eve; and woman must always make herself more womanly in order to please the sons of Adam. And both must refine and elevate the type of their respective sexes, higher and higher, to the greatest sublimity which human hands and poet's wings may attain. Woman may dress, if she likes, with all the allurements of art; she may adorn her hair with the fragrant flowers of sentiment, assume all the classic graces and consume us with the fire of all her physical and moral seductions; but, at the bottom, there should ever remain a female, and under the wings of an angel and a cherub there should always be an Eve. And man may torture his ambition in order to bend it under the heel of love, and spur his talent so that it may throw its treasures at the feet of his idol; he may be a hero or a martyr, Spartacus or Cæsar, a tamed lion or a roaring lion; but in his loves let him always be as manly as ever, so that woman, after having stripped her hero, may always find an Adam. Seduction is never baseness, never violence, never treachery, never tyranny, when it is inspired by a true and great love, when it is the alliance of all our forces guided by the most legitimate, the most powerful, the most ardent of our desires, that of loving and being loved. Without love, seduction is a rape of voluptuousness, or a bargain in mordant vanities; it is either a crime or a vice. CHAPTER IV MODESTY Modesty is one of the psychical phenomena the physiological study of which is more difficult because that phenomenon is very indistinct and vague, although prepotent and most exacting in some of its forms; because it is very variable in the different races; and because, though a part of the energies which develop in the reciprocal approaching of the sexes, it seems to keep them apart, and, born of love, seems to have a tendency to frustrate its supreme end.