Thus, in the case of the ascetics, whose thoughts were continually occupied with sexual matters, the sole result of their castigation, self-torture, and emasculation, was to lead their sexual life ever wider astray into morbid and perverse paths. The monstrous =sexual visions= of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perceptions of the ascetics. To use the words of Augustine, how far were these unhappy beings from the “serene clearness of love,” how near were they to the “obscurity of sensual lust!” These visions, these “false pictures,” allured the “sleepers” to something to which, indeed, in the awakening state they could not have been misled (Augustine, “Confessions,” x. 30). The forms of beautiful naked women (with whom, moreover, the ascetics often really lay in bed in order to test their powers) appeared to them in dreams. Fetichistic and symbolic vision of an erotic nature pestered them, and led to the most violent sensual temptations, until in the sects of the Valesians, the Marcionites, and the Gnostics they resulted in sexual excesses. Marcion, the founder of the well-known sect named after him, preached continence, but maintained that sexual excesses could not hinder salvation, since it was only the soul that rose again after death! The Gnostics oscillated between unconditional celibacy and indiscriminate sexual indulgence. As late as the nineteenth century an ascetic mystic led the Protestant sect of Königsberg pietists into the grossest sensual excesses. From asceticism arose =monasticism= and the =cloistral life=, to which the considerations above given fully apply. The undeniable unchastity of the medieval cloisters, which found its most characteristic expression in denoting brothels by the name of “abbeys,” and, above all, in popular songs and in folk-tales, also shows us very clearly the relations between religious asceticism and the _vita sexualis_. The idea of asceticism has not lost its primitive force even at the present day, and retains it for certain men not under the influence of the Church. But the character and origin of this =modern asceticism= are different. We understand it when we remind ourselves of the saying of Otto Weininger, this typical adherent of “modern” asceticism, that the man who has the worst opinion of woman is not the one who has least to do with them, but rather the one who has had the greatest number of _bonnes fortunes_ (“Sex and Character,” p. 315).