We may regard as a special variety of the ascetic view of sex,—­for the ascetics, as we see, freely but not quite legitimately, based their asceticism largely on aesthetic considerations,—­that insistence on the proximity of the sexual to the excretory centres which found expression in the early Church in Augustine’s depreciatory assertion:  “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur,” and still persists among many who by no means always associate it with religious asceticism.[48] “As a result of what ridiculous economy, and of what Mephistophilian irony,” asks Tarde,[49] “has Nature imagined that a function so lofty, so worthy of the poetic and philosophical hymns which have celebrated it, only deserved to have its exclusive organ shared with that of the vilest corporal functions?”

It may, however, be pointed out that this view of the matter, however unconsciously, is itself the outcome of the ascetic depreciation of the body.  From a scientific point of view, the metabolic processes of the body from one end to the other, whether regarded chemically or psychologically, are all interwoven and all of equal dignity.  We cannot separate out any particular chemical or biological process and declare:  This is vile.  Even what we call excrement still stores up the stuff of our lives.  Eating has to some persons seemed a disgusting process.  But yet it has been possible to say, with Thoreau, that “the gods have really intended that men should feed divinely, as themselves, on their own nectar and ambrosia....  I have felt that eating became a sacrament, a method of communion, an ecstatic exercise, and a sitting at the communion table of the world.”

The sacraments of Nature are in this way everywhere woven into the texture of men’s and women’s bodies.  Lips good to kiss with are indeed first of all chiefly good to eat and drink with.  So accumulated and overlapped have the centres of force become in the long course of development, that the mucous membranes of the natural orifices, through the sensitiveness gained in their own offices, all become agents to thrill the soul in the contact of love; it is idle to discriminate high or low, pure or impure; all alike are sanctified already by the extreme unction of Nature.  The nose receives the breath of life; the vagina receives the water of life.  Ultimately the worth and loveliness of life must be measured by the worth and loveliness for us of the instruments of life.  The swelling breasts are such divinely gracious insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs at them and sucks; the large curves of the hips are so voluptuous because of the potential child they clasp within them; there can be no division here, we cannot cut the roots from the tree.  The supreme function of manhood—­the handing on of the lamp of life to future races—­is carried on, it is true, by the same instrument that is the daily conduit of the bladder.  It has been said in scorn that we are born between urine and excrement; it may be said, in reverence, that the passage through this channel of birth is a sacrament of Nature’s more sacred and significant than men could ever invent.