“Traces of the night-inspiration, of the influence of the primitive fire-group, abound in woman.  Indeed, it may be said (the life of Southern Europe and of American society of to-day illustrates this point abundantly) that she is, in a sense, a night-being, for the activity, physical and moral, of modern women (revealed e.g. in the dance and the nocturnal intellectualities of society) in this direction is remarkable.  Perhaps we may style a good deal of her ordinary day-labor as rest, or the commonplaces and banalities of her existence, her evening and night life being the true side of her activities” (A.F.  Chamberlain, “Work and Rest,” Popular Science Monthly, March, 1902).  Giessler, who has studied the general influence of darkness on human psychic life, reaches conclusions which harmonize with these (C.M.  Giessler, “Der Einfluss der Dunkelheit auf das Seelenleben des Menschen,” Vierteljahrsschrift fuer wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1904, pp. 255-279).  I have not been able to see Giessler’s paper, but, according to a summary of it, he comes to the result that in the dark the soul’s activities are nearer to its motor pole than to its sensitive pole, and that there is a tendency for phenomena belonging to the early period of development to be prominent, motor memory functioning more than representative memory, attention more than apperception, imagination more than logical thinking, egoistic more than altruistic morals.

It is curious to note that short-sightedness, naturally, though illogically, tends to exert the same influence as darkness in this respect; I am assured by short-sighted persons of both sexes that they are much more liable to the emotions of shyness and modesty with their glasses than without them; such persons with difficulty realize that they are not so dim to others as others are to them.  To be in the company of a blind person seems also to be a protection against shyness.[67] It is interesting to learn that congenitally blind children are as sensitive to appearances as normal children, and blush as readily.[68] This would seem to be due to the fact that the habitually blind have permanently adjusted their mental focus to that of normal persons, and react in the same manner as normal persons; blindness is not for them, as it is for the short-sighted without their glasses, a temporary and relative, almost unconscious refuge from clear vision.

It is, of course, not as the mere cloak of a possible blush that darkness gives courage; it is because it lulls detailed self-realization, such conscious self-realization being always a source of fears, and the blush their definite symbol and visible climax.  It is to the blush that we must attribute a curious complementary relationship between the face and the sacro-pubic region as centres of anatomical modesty.  The women of some African tribes who go naked, Emin Bey remarked, cover the face with the hand under the influence of modesty.  Martial long since observed (Lib. iii, LXVIII) that when an innocent girl looks at the penis she gazes through her fingers.  Where, as among many Mohammedan peoples, the face is the chief focus of modesty, the exposure of the rest of the body, including sometimes even the sacro-pubic region, and certainly the legs and thighs, often becomes a matter of indifference.[69]