No, we must on the basis of natural science attain, in a newer and
nobler form, the whole antique love for bodily strength and beauty, the
whole antique reverence for the divine character of the continuation of
the race, combined with the whole modern consciousness of the soulful
happiness of ideal love. Only so can the demand for real chastity save
mankind from the torments which sexual divisions and degradations now
bring with them. It is profoundly significant that in the world of the
past, divinity was associated with woman on the ground of observations
concerning the continuation of the race; while in Christianity, woman
became divine as the Virgin Mother. Through heathen and Christian
thought, reunited and ennobled, the woman will receive a new reference
for herself as a sexual being. Antique and modern love, the love of the
senses and the love of soul, will, united and ennobled, induce human
beings, men and women alike, to adore again Eros the All-powerful.
To diminish the significance of love, to oppose it as a lowering
sensualism, does not mean the elevation of mankind; it means, on the
other hand, working for its debasement. For as lowering as sexual life
would be if it were continued in man accompanied by a feeling of shame
as a characteristic of animal life, it would be just the same if it were
regarded as a degrading duty, reluctantly carried out for the
preservation of the species.
Antiquity stood higher than the present day, for example when Lycurgus'
laws asserted that a people's strength lies in the breast of blooming
womanhood. Accordingly in Sparta, the physical development of the woman
was watched over as well as of the man, and the age of marriage was
determined with reference to a healthy offspring. Higher, too, stood
Judaism in relation to the conception of the seriousness of bearing
children. This conviction expressed itself in the strictest hygienic
legislation known to history. Jewish, like other Oriental legislation,
depended, in relation to sexual morality as in relation to diet, on
sharp-sighted observations of natural law and disease. The foundation to
a new ethic in these questions cannot be laid, until men begin with Old
Testament shrewdness and Old Testament seriousness to handle the life
questions which the idealism of Christianity has indeed spiritualised
but at the same time debased.
This new ethic will call no other common living of man and woman
immoral, except that which gives occasion to a weak offspring, and
produces bad conditions for the development of their offspring. The Ten
Commandments on this subject will not be prescribed by the founders of
religion, but by scientists.
Up to the present day, partly as a result of a perverted modesty in such
things, science has only been able to offer incomplete observations on
the physical and psychical conditions for the improvement of the human
type in its actual genesis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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