as a substitute for beauty of body appears early in the history of mankind, and, as we know, tends to be absolutely accepted in civilization.[136] “We exclaim,” as Goethe remarks, “’What a beautiful little foot!’ when we have merely seen a pretty shoe; we admire the lovely waist when nothing has met out eyes but an elegant girdle.”  Our realities and our traditional ideals are hopelessly at variance; the Greeks represented their statues without pubic hair because in real life they had adopted the oriental custom of removing the hairs; we compel our sculptors and painters to make similar representations, though they no longer correspond either to realities or to our own ideas of what is beautiful and fitting in real life.  Our artists are themselves equally ignorant and confused, and, as Stratz has repeatedly shown, they constantly reproduce in all innocence the deformations and pathological characters of defective models.  If we were honest, we should say—­like the little boy before a picture of the Judgment of Paris, in answer to his mother’s question as to which of the three goddesses he thought most beautiful—­“I can’t tell, because they haven’t their clothes on.”

The concealment actually attained was not, however, it would appear, originally sought.  Various authors have brought together evidence to show that the main primitive purpose of adornment and clothing among savages is not to conceal the body, but to draw attention to it and to render it more attractive.  Westermarck, especially, brings forward numerous examples of savage adornments which serve to attract attention to the sexual regions of man and woman.[137] He further argues that the primitive object of various savage peoples in practicing circumcision, as other similar mutilations, is really to secure sexual attractiveness, whatever religious significance they may sometimes have developed subsequently.  A more recent view represents the magical influence of both adornment and mutilation as primary, as a method of guarding and insulating dangerous bodily functions.  Frazer, in The Golden Bough, is the most able and brilliant champion of this view, which undoubtedly embodies a large element of truth, although it must not be accepted to the absolute exclusion of the influence of sexual attractiveness.  The two are largely woven in together.[138]

There is, indeed, a general tendency for the sexual functions to take on a religious character and for the sexual organs to become sacred at a very early period in culture.  Generation, the reproductive force in man, animals, and plants, was realized by primitive man to be a fact of the first magnitude, and he symbolized it in the sexual organs of man and woman, which thus attained to a solemnity which was entirely independent of purposes of sexual allurement.  Phallus worship may almost be said to be a universal phenomenon; it is found even among races of high culture, among the Romans of the Empire and the Japanese to-day; it has, indeed, been thought by some that one of the origins of the cross is to be found in the phallus.