Stanley Hall, who emphasizes the importance of nakedness, remarks that at puberty we have much reason to assume that in a state of nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the new local development, and quotes the observation of Dr. Seerley that the impulse to conceal the sexual organs is especially marked in young men who are underdeveloped, but not evident in those who are developed beyond the average.  Stanley Hall (Adolescence, vol. ii, p. 97), also refers to the frequency with which not only “virtuous young men, but even women, rather glory in occasions when they can display the beauty of their forms without reserve, not only to themselves and to loved ones, but even to others with proper pretexts.”

Many have doubtless noted this tendency, especially in women, and chiefly in those who are conscious of beautiful physical development.  Madame Celine Renooz believes that the tendency corresponds to a really deep-rooted instinct in women, little or not at all manifested in men who have consequently sought to impose artificially on women their own masculine conceptions of modesty.  “In the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority and cannot understand why she must hide its cause.  At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should, or should not, affright her.  A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of that human epoch” (Celine Renooz, Psychologie Comparee de l’Homme et de la Femme, pp. 85-87).  Perhaps this was obscurely felt by the German girl (mentioned in Kalbeck’s Life of Brahms), who said:  “One enjoys music twice as much decolletee.”

From the point of view with which we are here essentially concerned there are three ways in which the cultivation of nakedness—­so far as it is permitted by the slow education of public opinion—­tends to exert an influence:  (1) It is an important element in the sexual hygiene of the young, introducing a wholesome knowledge and incuriosity into a sphere once given up to prudery and pruriency. (2) The effect of nakedness is beneficial on those of more mature age, also, in so far as it tends to cultivate the sense of beauty and to furnish the tonic and consoling influences of natural vigor and grace. (3) The custom of nakedness, in its inception at all events, has a dynamic psychological influence also on morals, an influence exerted in the substitution of a strenuous and positive morality for the merely negative and timid morality which has ruled in this sphere.