the conventional hand-shake and the conventional kiss, and at the other end the final and intimate contact in which passion finds the supreme satisfaction of its most profound desire.  The intermediate region has its great significance for us because it offers a field in which affection has its full scope, but in which every road may possibly lead to the goal of sexual love.  It is the intimacy of touch contacts, their inevitable approach to the threshold of sexual emotion, which leads to a jealous and instinctive parsimony in the contact of skin and skin and to the tendency with the increased sensitiveness of the nervous system involved by civilization to restrain even the conventional touch manifestation of ordinary affection and esteem.  In China fathers leave off kissing their daughters while they are still young children.  In England the kiss as an ordinary greeting between men and women—­a custom inherited from classic and early Christian antiquity—­still persisted to the beginning of the eighteenth century.  In France the same custom existed in the seventeenth century, but in the middle of that century was beginning to be regarded as dangerous,[2] while at the present time the conventional kiss on the cheek is strictly differentiated from the kiss on the mouth, which is reserved for lovers.  Touch contacts between person and person, other than those limited and defined by custom, tend to become either unpleasant—­as an undesired intrusion into an intimate sphere—­or else, when occurring between man and woman at some peculiar moment, they may make a powerful reverberation in the emotional and more specifically sexual sphere.  One man falls in love with his future wife because he has to carry her upstairs with a sprained ankle.  Another dates his love-story from a romp in which his cheek accidentally came in contact with that of his future wife.  A woman will sometimes instinctively strive to attract the attention of the man who appeals to her by a peculiar and prolonged pressure of the hand—­the only touch contact permitted to her.  Dante, as Penta has remarked, refers to “sight or touch” as the two channels through which a woman’s love is revived (Purgatorio, VIII, 76).  Even the hand-shake of a sympathetic man is enough in some chaste and sensitive women to produce sexual excitement or sometimes even the orgasm.  The cases in which love arises from the influence of stimuli coming through the sense of touch are no doubt frequent, and they would be still more frequent if it were not that the very proximity of this sense to the sexual sphere causes it to be guarded with a care which in the case of the other senses it is impossible to exercise.  This intimacy of touch and the reaction against its sexual approximations leads to what James has called “the antisexual instinct, the instinct of personal isolation, the actual repulsiveness to us of the idea of intimate contact with most of the persons we meet, especially those of our own sex.”  He refers in this connection to the unpleasantness of the sensation felt on occupying a seat still warm from the body of another person.[3] The Catholic Church has always recognized the risks of vuluptuous emotion involved in tactile contacts, and the facility with which even the most innocent contacts may take on a libidinous character.[4]