of affection I have never ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be worthily filled—­even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain.”  And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote:  “Why can no one love me?  I could give more than most women, and yet the most insignificant women are loved and I am not.”  Love, they all seem to say, is the one thing that is supremely worth while.  The greatest and most brilliant of the world’s intellectual giants, in their moments of final insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote The Imitation of Christ or The Letters of a Portuguese Nun.  And how many others!

FOOTNOTES: 

[45] Meditationes Piissimae de Cognitione Humanae Conditionis, Migne’s Patrologia, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap.  III, “De Dignitate Animae et Vilitate Corporis.”  It may be worth while to quote more at length the vigorous language of the original.  “Si diligenter consideres quid per os et nares caeterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum numquam vidisti....  Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum, et quid es ab ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam.  Profecto fuit quand non eras:  postea de vili materia factus, et vilissimo panno involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica tua fuit pellis secundina.  Nihil aliud est homo quam sperma fetidum, saccus stercorum, cibus vermium....  Quid superbis, pulvis et cinis, cujus conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere poena, mori angustia?”

[46] See (in Mignes’ edition) S.  Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis Collationes, lib. ii, cap.  IX.

[47] Duehren (Neue Forshungen ueber die Marquis de Sade, pp. 432 et seq.) shows how the ascetic view of woman’s body persisted, for instance, in Schopenhauer and De Sade.

[48] In “The Evolution of Modesty,” in the first volume of these Studies, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the study of “Erotic Symbolism,” the mutual reactions of the sexual and excretory centres were fully dealt with.

[49] “La Morale Sexuelle,” Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907.

[50] The above passage, now slightly modified, originally formed an unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in The New Spirit, first issued in 1889.

[51] Even in the ninth century, however, when the monastic movement was rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the tendencies of the new ascetics.  Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of Corbie, wrote a treatise (Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus est) to prove that Mary really gave birth to Jesus through her sexual organs, and not, as some high-strung persons were beginning to think could alone be possible, through the more conventionally decent breasts.  The sexual organs were sanctified.  “Spiritus sanctus ... et thalamum tanto dignum sponso sanctificavit et portam” (Achery, Spicilegium, vol. i, p. 55).