“What, then, shall we think of those who pretend to be in a condition of quiet thought and activity, and yet are so intolerably sensitive that as a result of the most trivial and most remote impulse, passion arises in them, and who believe themselves to be the more fully equipped with the sense of shame the more readily they find in everything something worthy of suspicion? They do not really find what they pretend to find in every occurrence; =it is their own crude lust which lies always on the watch=, and springs forward as soon as anything shows itself in the distance akin to themselves, and which therefore they find it possible to condemn; and they will quickly seize an opportunity for blaming anything of which the motives were =absolutely blameless=. Ordinarily, indeed, blamelessness appears to them a pretence. Youths and maidens are represented as knowing nothing as yet of love, but none the less as full of yearnings which every moment threaten to break out, and which clutch the slightest opportunity in order to grasp the forbidden fruit. But this is absurd. True youths and maidens are, indeed, the ideals of this kind of modesty, =but in them it takes another form=. Only that which has no other purpose than to arouse desire and passion can do them any harm; =but why should they not be allowed to learn love and to understand Nature, both of which they see everywhere round them=? Why should they not, without restraint, understand and enjoy what is thought and said about these matters, since in this way so much the less would passion be aroused in them? =Such anxious and limited modesty as is at the present day characteristic of society is based only upon the consciousness of a great and widespread perversity, and upon a deep corruption.= What will be the end of all this? If matters were left to themselves, they would become worse and worse; when we so persistently hunt out that which in reality is =not shameful=, we shall at last succeed in finding something immodest in every circle of ideas; and finally all conversation and all society must come to an end; we must separate the sexes so that they may not look at one another; we must introduce monasticism, or even something more severe. But this is not to be borne, and it will happen to our society as it happened to our wives when morality confined them ever more and more strictly, until at last it became improper for them to show the tips of their fingers--and then in despair they suddenly turned round, and they exposed their necks, their shoulders, and their breasts to the rude winds and to lascivious eyes; or, like the caterpillars, they cast off their old skin by a predetermined movement. Thus will it be; when corruption has reached its climax, and the crude impulses become so dominant =that it is no longer possible to keep them within bounds=,