[65] Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii, pp. 608 et seq.

[66] “Perhaps there is scarcely a man,” wrote Malthus, a clergyman as well as one of the profoundest thinkers of his day (Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798, Ch.  XI), “who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.  The superiority of intellectual to sexual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiate, than in their being more real and essential.”

[67] The whole argument of the fourth volume of these Studies, on “Sexual Selection in Man,” points in this direction.

[68] “Perhaps most average men,” Forel remarks (Die Sexuelle Frage, p. 307), “are but slightly receptive to the intoxication of love; they are at most on the level of the gourmet, which is by no means necessarily an immoral plane, but is certainly not that of poetry.”

CHAPTER V.

THE FUNCTION OF CHASTITY.

Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love—­The Eighteenth Century Revolt Against the Ideal of Chastity—­Unnatural Forms of Chastity—­The Psychological Basis of Asceticism—­Asceticism and Chastity as Savage Virtues—­The Significance of Tahiti—­Chastity Among Barbarous Peoples—­Chastity Among the Early Christians—­Struggles of the Saints with the Flesh—­The Romance of Christian Chastity—­Its Decay in Mediaeval Times—­Aucassin et Nicolette and the new Romance of Chaste Love—­The Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians—­The Penitentials—­Influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation—­The Revolt Against Virginity as a Virtue—­The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue—­The Influences That Favor the Virtue of Chastity—­Chastity as a Discipline—­The Value of Chastity for the Artist—­Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation—­The Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.

The supreme importance of chastity, and even of asceticism, has never at any time, or in any greatly vital human society, altogether failed of recognition.  Sometimes chastity has been exalted in human estimation, sometimes it has been debased; it has frequently changed the nature of its manifestations; but it has always been there.  It is even a part of the beautiful vision of all Nature.  “The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind,” said Thoreau with his fine extravagance.  “To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in Nature.”  Without chastity it is impossible to maintain the dignity of sexual love.  The society in which its estimation sinks to a minimum is in the last stages of degeneration.  Chastity has for sexual love an importance which it can never lose, least of all to-day.