[52] Paedagogus, lib. ii, cap.  X. Elsewhere (id., lib. ii, Ch.  VI) he makes a more detailed statement to the same effect.

[53] See, e.g., Wilhelm Capitaine, Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien, pp. 112 et seq.

[54] De Civitate Dei, lib. xxii, cap.  XXIV.  “There is no need,” he says again (id., lib. xiv, cap.  V) “that in our sins and vices we accuse the nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind and degree the flesh is good.”

[55] St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, lib. xiv, cap.  XXIII-XXVI.  Chrysostom and Gregory, of Nyssa, thought that in Paradise human beings would have multiplied by special creation, but such is not the accepted Catholic doctrine.

[56] W. Capitaine, Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien, pp. 112 et seq.  Without the body, Tertullian declared, there could be no virginity and no salvation.  The soul itself is corporeal.  He carries, indeed, his idea of the omnipresence of the body to the absurd.

[57] Rufinus, Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum, cap.  XII.

[58] Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. xxvi, pp. 1170 et seq.

[59] Even in physical conformation the human sexual organs, when compared with those of the lower animals, show marked differences (see “The Mechanism of Detumescence,” in the fifth volume of these Studies).

[60] It may perhaps be as well to point out, with Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, p. 208), that the word “bestial” is generally used quite incorrectly in this connection.  Indeed, not only for the higher, but also for the lower manifestation of the sexual impulse, it would usually be more correct to use instead the qualification “human.”

[61] Loc. cit., Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907.

[62] It has, however, become colored and suspect from an early period in the history of Christianity.  St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, lib. xiv, cap.  XV), while admitting that libido or lust is merely the generic name for all desire, adds that, as specially applied to the sexual appetite, it is justly and properly mixed up with ideas of shame.

[63] Hinton well illustrates this feeling.  “We call by the name of lust,” he declares in his MSS., “the most simple and natural desires.  We might as well term hunger and thirst ‘lust’ as so call sex-passion, when expressing simply Nature’s prompting.  We miscall it ‘lust,’ cruelly libelling those to whom we ascribe it, and introduce absolute disorder.  For, by foolishly confounding Nature’s demands with lust, we insist upon restraint upon her.”

[64] Several centuries earlier another French writer, the distinguished physician, A. Laurentius (Des Laurens) in his Historia Anatomica Humani Corporis (lib. viii, Quaestio vii) had likewise puzzled over “the incredible desire of coitus,” and asked how it was that “that divine animal, full of reason and judgment, which we call Man, should be attracted to those obscene parts of women, soiled with filth, which are placed, like a sewer, in the lowest part of the body.”  It is noteworthy that, from the first, and equally among men of religion, men of science, and men of letters, the mystery of this problem has peculiarly appealed to the French mind.