It may be added that we may find a curiously inconsistent proof of the excessive importance attached to sexual function by a society which systematically tries to depreciate sex, in the disgrace which is attributed to the lack of “virile” potency.  Although civilized life offers immense scope for the activities of sexually impotent persons, the impotent man is made to feel that, while he need not be greatly concerned if he suffers from nervous disturbances of digestion, if he should suffer just as innocently from nervous disturbances of the sexual impulse, it is almost a crime.  A striking example of this was shown, a few years ago, when it was plausibly suggested that Carlyle’s relations with his wife might best be explained by supposing that he suffered from some trouble of sexual potency.  At once admirers rushed forward to “defend” Carlyle from this “disgraceful” charge; they were more shocked than if it had been alleged that he was a syphilitic.  Yet impotence is, at the most, an infirmity, whether due to some congenital anatomical defect or to a disturbance of nervous balance in the delicate sexual mechanism, such as is apt to occur in men of abnormally sensitive temperament.  It is no more disgraceful to suffer from it than from dyspepsia, with which, indeed, it may be associated.  Many men of genius and high moral character have been sexually deformed.  This was the case with Cowper (though this significant fact is suppressed by his biographers); Ruskin was divorced for a reason of this kind; and J.S.  Mill, it is said, was sexually of little more than infantile development.

Up to this point I have been considering the quality of chastity and the quality of asceticism in their most general sense and without any attempt at precise differentiation.[91] But if we are to accept these as modern virtues, valid to-day, it is necessary that we should be somewhat more precise in defining them.  It seems most convenient, and most strictly accordant also with etymology, if we agree to mean by asceticism or ascesis, the athlete quality of self-discipline, controlling, by no means necessarily for indefinitely prolonged periods, the gratification of the sexual impulse.  By chastity, which is primarily the quality of purity, and secondarily that of holiness, rather than of abstinence, we may best understand a due proportion between erotic claims and the other claims of life.  “Chastity,” as Ellen Key well says, “is harmony between body and soul in relation to love.”  Thus comprehended, asceticism is the virtue of control that leads up to erotic gratification, and chastity is the virtue which exerts its harmonizing influence in the erotic life itself.