and not a mere empty convention.  Such a movement could not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious softness in sexual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction.  For erotic satisfaction, in its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the sexual impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls “irradiation,” that is to say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism.  And that can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and direct gratification of sexual desire, by compelling it to increase its force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole soul as well as the whole body has its part.  “Only the chaste can be really obscene,” said Huysmans.  And on a higher plane, only the chaste can really love.

“Physical purity,” remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschaetzung der Physischen Reinheit,” Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, Part VIII) “was originally valued as a sign of greater strength of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above primitive conditions.  This purity was difficult to preserve in those unsure days; it was rare and unusual.  From this rarity rose the superstition of supernatural power residing in the virgin.  But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no longer needed to maintain it....  Physical purity can only possess value when it is the result of individual strength of character, and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality.”

Konrad Hoeller, who has given special attention to the sexual question in schools, remarks in relation to physical exercise:  “The greatest advantage of physical exercises, however, is not the development of the active and passive strength of the body and its skill, but the establishment and fortification of the authority of the will over the body and its needs, so much given up to indolence.  He who has learnt to endure and overcome, for the sake of a definite aim, hunger and thirst and fatigue, will be the better able to withstand sexual impulses and the temptation to gratify them, when better insight and aesthetic feeling have made clear to him, as one used to maintain authority over his body, that to yield would be injurious or disgraceful” (K.  Hoeller, “Die Aufgabe der Volksschule,” Sexualpaedagogik, p. 70).  Professor Schaefenacker (id., p. 102), who also emphasizes the importance of self-control and self-restraint, thinks a youth must bear in mind his future mission, as citizen and father of a family.

A subtle and penetrative thinker of to-day, Jules de Gaultier, writing on morals without reference to this specific question, has discussed