The chastity that is regarded by the moralist of to-day as a virtue has its worth by no means in its abstinence.  It is not, in St. Theresa’s words, the virtue of the tortoise which withdraws its limbs under its carapace.  It is a virtue because it is a discipline in self-control, because it helps to fortify the character and will, and because it is directly favorable to the cultivation of the most beautiful, exalted, and effective sexual life.  So viewed, chastity may be opposed to the demands of debased mediaeval Catholicism, but it is in harmony with the demands of our civilized life to-day, and by no means at variance with the requirements of Nature.

There is always an analogy between the instinct of reproduction and the instinct of nutrition.  In the matter of eating it is the influence of science, of physiology, which has finally put aside an exaggerated asceticism, and made eating “pure.”  The same process, as James Hinton well pointed out, has been made possible in the sexual relationships; “science has in its hands the key to purity."[85]

Many influences have, however, worked together to favor an insistence on chastity.  There has, in the first place, been an inevitable reaction against the sexual facility which had come to be regarded as natural.  Such facility was found to have no moral value, for it tended to relaxation of moral fibre and was unfavorable to the finest sexual satisfaction.  It could not even claim to be natural in any broad sense of the word, for, in Nature generally, sexual gratification tends to be rare and difficult.[86] Courtship is arduous and long, the season of love is strictly delimited, pregnancy interrupts sexual relationships.  Even among savages, so long as they have been untainted by civilization, virility is usually maintained by a fine asceticism; the endurance of hardship, self-control and restraint, tempered by rare orgies, constitute a discipline which covers the sexual as well as every other department of savage life.  To preserve the same virility in civilized life, it may well be felt, we must deliberately cultivate a virtue which under savage conditions of life is natural.[87]

The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of the virtue of chastity in its modern sense.  The command:  “Be hard,” as Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous attitude towards one’s self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately accepted ends.  “A relative chastity,” he wrote, “a fundamental and wise foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[88] In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern movement for the restoration of chastity to its proper place as a real and beneficial virtue,