Tolstoi also recognizes without reserve how much he had been affected by voluptuousness. “I know,” he says, “how lust hides everything, how it annihilates everything, by which the heart and the reason are nourished.” Lack of continence on the part of men is, in his view, the cause of the stupidity of life. Tolstoi’s conception of asceticism is, however, by no means identical with the early Christian, the Buddhistic, and the Schopenhauerian asceticism. In the beautiful saying, “Only with woman can one lose purity, only with her can one preserve it,” lies the admission that =absolute= chastity is an unattainable ideal, and that man can reach only a =relative asceticism=. We should hold fast to this utterance in Tolstoi’s teaching, which is in no way systematically developed, and should ignore his insane doctrine of the unchastity of married life. Later, during our discussion of the so-called “problem of continence,” we shall return to this idea of a relative continence, and of the good that lies therein. Weininger, whose views are unquestionably strongly pathological, recurs wholly to the ideas of early Christian asceticism. According to him, “coitus in every case contradicts the idea of humanity”! Sexuality debases man, reproduction and fertility are “=nauseating=.”[59] Man is not free, only because he has originated in an immoral manner! In woman he denies again and again the idea of humanity. The renunciation, the conquest of femininity, it is this that he demands. =Since all femininity is immorality, woman must cease to be woman, and must become man!=[60] Georg Hirth has described Weininger’s book as “an unparalleled crime against humanity.”[61] Since, however, Probst, in his psychiatric study of Weininger, has brought forward evidence to show that in Weininger’s book we have to do with the work of a lunatic, the author of this crime cannot at any rate be held responsible. It is only to be regretted that so many readers have been led astray by the presence of isolated thoughtful passages in the book to take Weininger in earnest as a “thinker,” and even in company with the bizarre August Strindberg to believe that Weininger has solved “the most difficult of all problems”! * * * * * Very significant and influential even down to the present day are the relations between religion and sexual sentiments exhibited in the =belief in witchcraft=.[62] This belief, extending backwards to the most remote age, is the principal source of all misogyny and contempt for women--of which fact we cannot too often remind our modern misogynists, in order to make clear to them the utter stupidity, the primitiveness, and the atavistic character of their views.