Many great thinkers have striven against this profound and primitive connection between the bodily and spiritual impulses, which has seemed to them an intrusion of evil, impairing their pure spirituality by the sexual life. They have thus recommended and followed asceticism in order to arrive at a heightened spirituality. The error here is obvious. The spiritual activities cannot be divided from the physical; as well cut the flower off from its roots, and then expect to gather the fruit. This is why sex-denial and sex-excesses so often go together. Hence the undeniable unchastity of the mediaeval cloisters. Nor need the manifestations of sex be physical. Erotic imagination and voluptuous revelations are expressions of sex-passion. The monstrous sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the sexual perception of ascetics. We observe it, then, as a fact of wide experience that the ascetic life is rooted really in the functional impulses; and further, that it is only through sexual perception that the spiritual and imaginative can be grasped and reached. What the ascetic has done is to fear overmuch. It must not be overlooked that this continual battle with the primary force of life is necessarily futile in accomplishing its own aim. For the woman or man who, for the religious or any other ideal, wishes to overcome the sex-needs must keep the subject always before her, or his, consciousness. Thus it comes about that the ascetic is always more occupied with sex than the normal individual. It seems to me that this is a truth few women have learnt to face.