It will be seen that asceticism by no means necessarily involves perpetual continence.  Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training, which has reference to an end not itself.  If it is compulsorily perpetual, whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life.  If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot be subserved by a person who is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his own natural instincts.  A man may, indeed, as a matter of taste or preference, live his whole life in sexual abstinence, freely and easily, but in that case he is not an ascetic, and his abstinence is neither a subject for applause nor for criticism.

In the same way chastity, far from involving sexual abstinence, only has its value when it is brought within the erotic sphere.  A purity that is ignorance, when the age of childish innocence is once passed, is mere stupidity; it is nearer to vice than to virtue.  Nor is purity consonant with effort and struggle; in that respect it differs from asceticism.  “We conquer the bondage of sex,” Rosa Mayreder says, “by acceptance, not by denials, and men can only do this with the help of women.”  The would-be chastity of cold calculation is equally unbeautiful and unreal, and without any sort of value.  A true and worthy chastity can only be supported by an ardent ideal, whether, as among the early Christians, this is the erotic ideal of a new romance, or, as among ourselves, a more humanly erotic ideal.  “Only erotic idealism,” says Ellen Key, “can arouse enthusiasm for chastity.”  Chastity in a healthily developed person can thus be beautifully exercised only in the actual erotic life; in part it is the natural instinct of dignity and temperance; in part it is the art of touching the things of sex with hands that remember their aptness for all the fine ends of life.  Upon the doorway of entrance to the inmost sanctuary of love there is thus the same inscription as on the doorway to the Epidaurian Sanctuary of Aesculapius:  “None but the pure shall enter here.”

It will be seen that the definition of chastity remains somewhat lacking in precision.  That is inevitable.  We cannot grasp purity tightly, for, like snow, it will merely melt in our hands.  “Purity itself forbids too minute a system of rules for the observance of purity,” well says Sidgwick (Methods of Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch.  IX).  Elsewhere (op. cit., Bk. iii, Ch.  XI) he attempts to answer the question:  What sexual relations are essentially impure? and concludes that no answer is possible.  “There appears to be no distinct principle, having any claim to self-evidence, upon which the question can be answered so as to command general assent.”  Even what is called “Free Love,” he adds,