To neither of these attitudes has this book, or the spirit of it, even the remotest relation. The acknowledgment that Mortal Life is desirable, and that consequently its indispensable correlative Sex is desirable, can be made by a man in full possession of a healthy control over his passions,[3] in a state of complete mastery over his appetites, and endowed with the most fastidious taste as to where normal desire and its gratification end, and where excess begins. Extremes belong only to the uncultured, to the hogs of life. It is they who make everything appear disgusting, simply because they are unable to approach a single aspect of life with that amount of understanding and reverence which is due to all things connected with the sacred task of making mankind and his existence an honour and not a curse to the universe. To accept the proposition that Mortal Life is desirable and to commit one’s self by so doing to its inevitable rider that Sex is desirable, may lead one very far, as this book will show; but, if it lead one to a tastelessly pornographic or licentious attitude towards the most fundamental instinct of life, then one is of a nature that has no right to Mortal Life, much less, therefore, to its indispensable correlative Sex. Without wishing to labour this point, but with a keen sense of the host of misunderstandings and prejudices that will cling like barnacles to a book of this kind, unless I make my position unmistakably clear from the start, let me put the case a little differently by the use of another instinct of Mortal Life. Let me say, to accept the proposition, _Mortal Life is desirable_, is to commit one’s self to its inevitable rider that eating and drinking are desirable. There is no objection to this statement as it stands. All who endorse Mortal Life also endorse eating and drinking. And those who attack eating and drinking, simultaneously strike at Mortal Life. This conclusion, however, provides absolutely no sanction for those who are sufficiently material and gross to make food and drink things of shame and of horror. No man, therefore, need fear lest by acknowledging that eating and drinking are desirable he should find himself supporting gluttony, drunkenness and bestiality of all kinds. It is, however, a strange and significant coincidence that, where we find hostility to Sex, we also find a certain suspicion of all things connected with the body. The Puritans did not accept Sex as desirable; at the best they held it to be a necessary evil; but we also find the Puritans hostile to eating and drinking, and not only to excessive eating and drinking. I have already shown with sufficient elaboration elsewhere what regrettable reforms in food and drink they introduced into England in the seventeenth century.[4] This only supports my contention that you cannot be hostile to Sex without being hostile to Mortal Life in general.