The child has to learn to look at flowers and not pluck them; the man has to learn to look at a woman’s beauty and not desire to possess it.  The joyous conquest over that “erotic kleptomania,” as Ellen Key has well said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization.  We fancy the conquest is difficult, even impossibly difficult.  But it is not so.  This impulse, like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop temperately and wholesomely.  We artificially press a stupid and brutal hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of repression and license, one extreme as foul as the other.

To those who have been bred under bad conditions, it may indeed seem hopeless to attempt to rise to the level of the Greeks and the other finer tempered peoples of antiquity in realizing the moral, as well as the pedagogic, hygienic, and aesthetic advantages[44] of admitting into life the spectacle of the naked human body.  But unless we do we hopelessly fetter ourselves in our march along the road of civilization, we deprive ourselves at once of a source of moral strength and of joyous inspiration.  Just as Wesley once asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, so to-day men are beginning to ask why the human body, the most divine melody at its finest moments that creation has yielded, should be allowed to become the perquisite of those who lust for the obscene.  And some are, further, convinced that by enlisting it on the side of purity and strength they are raising the most powerful of all bulwarks against the invasion of a vicious conception of life and the consequent degradation of sex.  These are considerations which we cannot longer afford to neglect, however great the opposition they arouse among the unthinking.

“Folk are afraid of such things rousing the passions,” Edward Carpenter remarks.  “No doubt the things may act that way.  But why, we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing passions which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?” It is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral formulae are no longer strong enough to control passion adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is cankered with rust.  “The cure is not to cut off the passions, or to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy engine of general morality and common sense within which they will work” (Edward Carpenter, Albany Review, Sept., 1907).

So far as I am aware, however, it was James Hinton who chiefly sought to make clear the possibility of a positive morality on the basis of nakedness, beauty, and sexual influence, regarded as dynamic forces which, when suppressed, make for corruption and when wisely used serve to inspire and ennoble life.  He worked out his thoughts on this matter in MSS., written from about 1870 to his death two years later, which, never having been prepared for publication, remain in a fragmentary