all these false appearances will break down of themselves, and behind them we shall see youthful shamelessness which has long intimately entwined itself round the body of society, so that this has become the true skin in which society naturally and easily moves. Complete corruption and =completed culture, by way of which we return to blamelessness=--both of these make an end of prudery.” Fine words from a theologian! This thoroughly just description of the nature of prudery and of its dangers should be laid seriously to heart by our modern theological bigots and moral fanatics. How truly Schleiermacher has depicted the nature of prudery is shown by the observations of the alienist J. L. A. Koch, that it is precisely the women who were formerly prudish and “moral” when they become insane--for example, in mania--who are much more shameless than women who in everyday life had taken a more natural view of sexual relationships. The =eternal concealment= of the most natural things is what first makes them appear unnatural, first awakens desire, where otherwise they would have been passed by quietly and harmlessly without attention. At the present day the natural justifiable sense of shame has been =intensified= to an unnatural degree, and has been falsified to such an extent that this exaggeration of the sense of shame, this unceasing objective suppression of natural harmless activities and feelings, has really increased the hidden desires to an immeasurable degree; it is this, in fact, which heaps fuel on the fire of fleshly lust.[133] The genuine, natural, biological sense of shame sets bounds to lust. To this shame we owe the ennobling and spiritualizing of the crude sexual impulse; it is the preliminary stage to the individualization of that impulse. It is intimately related to that voluntary, temporary, and relative continence which has so great an importance for the individual life. The sense of shame has civilized the sexual impulse without denying its essential basis. Complete culture returns to complete innocence. It knows no fig-leaves; it does not go about, as did recently in the Dresden Museum a clergyman affected with the psychosis of hyper-prudery, knocking off the genital organs from naked statues; nor does it castrate the human spirit, as we find most biographers do even now in the case of the great men whose lives they describe. It recognizes the sexual as something noble and natural.