I, too,--I must admit it,--through the various periods of life, have changed the idea I first had of modesty. At first it seemed to me a sentiment that rises within us in childhood and during adolescence, as spontaneous as egotism, self-esteem and love; but, later, I became convinced that modesty is taught first and learned afterward; therefore, it is one of those sentiments which I term _acquired_ or _secondary_. Modesty is an _extra-current_ of love, and has its principal source in those powerful energies which, through a battle or a choice, must relight the torch of life. Animals demonstrate to us some rudimentary forms originating from modesty. Many of them conceal themselves when offering a sacrifice to voluptuousness; very many females, sought by the male, begin by fleeing, resisting, hiding that which they desire to concede. And this is probably an irreflective, automatic act; it is, perhaps, a form of fear which rises before the aggressive demands of the male; but the aim of these resistances, of these pretenses of modesty is to excite the male as much as the female and to make the ground better fitted for fecundation. It is possible that animals conceal their loves from our sight to protect themselves from danger, knowing that in those supreme moments they are exposed to every attack; but until the psychology of brutes is so limited we will be allowed to assume that among them also the first light of modesty has penetrated. If this be so, then we will find justification in the fact that, in superior animals also, this sentiment appears first in the female, for whom the anatomy of the organs and the defensive mission in the battles of love make the actions of modesty more spontaneous and natural. And to the human female, too, nature has assigned the same mission, making her characteristically a hundred times more modest than the male. The first hand brought by woman to cover parts which the male wished to see gave origin to the first energies of the sentiment of modesty, which arose, therefore, at the same time as the first forms of coquetry. Man and woman, then living together in the family or in the tribe, were naturally forced to become, independently of their greater psychical development, the most modest animals, because woman is subject to repulsive periodical infirmities and man shows other genital phenomena which, if not concealed, would attract too much attention from all and excite perturbation in males and in females. It is therefore natural that almost all, not to say all, races of the earth present some form of modesty, and that also in the human race the female should be more modest than the male, because the aggressive mission, which is reserved to him by nature, makes modesty dangerous and almost impossible, at least in the last battles.