universe, an anomaly.  He is like those persons in our insane asylums, who feel that the instinct of nutrition is evil and so proceed to starve themselves.  They are alike spiritual outcasts in the universe whose children they are.  It is another matter when a man declares that, personally, in his own case, he cherishes an ascetic ideal which leads him to restrain, so far as possible, either or both impulses.  The man, who is sanely ascetic seeks a discipline which aids the ideal he has personally set before himself.  He may still remain theoretically in harmony with the universe to which he belongs.  But to pour contempt on the sexual life, to throw the veil of “impurity” over it, is, as Nietzsche declared, the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost of Life.

There are many who seek to conciliate prejudice and reason in their valuation of sex by drawing a sharp distinction between “lust” and “love,” rejecting the one and accepting the other.  It is quite proper to make such a distinction, but the manner in which it is made will by no means usually bear examination.  We have to define what we mean by “lust” and what we mean by “love,” and this is not easy if they are regarded as mutually exclusive.  It is sometimes said that “lust” must be understood as meaning a reckless indulgence of the sexual impulse without regard to other considerations.  So understood, we are quite safe in rejecting it.  But that is an entirely arbitrary definition of the word.  “Lust” is really a very ambiguous term; it is a good word that has changed its moral values, and therefore we need to define it very carefully before we venture to use it.  Properly speaking, “lust” is an entirely colorless word[62] and merely means desire in general and sexual desire in particular; it corresponds to “hunger” or “thirst”; to use it in an offensive sense is much the same as though we should always assume that the word “hungry” had the offensive meaning of “greedy.”  The result has been that sensitive minds indignantly reject the term “lust” in connection with love.[63] In the early use of our language, “lust,” “lusty,” and “lustful” conveyed the sense of wholesome and normal sexual vigor; now, with the partial exception of “lusty,” they have been so completely degraded to a lower sense that although it would be very convenient to restore them to their original and proper place, which still remains vacant, the attempt at such a restoration scarcely seems a hopeful task.  We have so deeply poisoned the springs of feeling in these matters with mediaeval ascetic crudities that all our words of sex tend soon to become bespattered with filth; we may pick them up from the mud into which they have fallen and seek to purify them, but to many eyes they will still seem dirty.  One result of this tendency is that we have no simple, precise, natural word for the love of the sexes, and are compelled to fall back on the general term, which is so extensive in its range that in English and French and most of the other leading languages of Europe, it is equally correct to “love” God or to “love” eating.