“in so far as it is earnestly advocated as a means to a completer harmony of sentiment between men and women, cannot be condemned as impure, for it seems paradoxical to distinguish purity from impurity merely by less rapidity of transition.”

Moll, from the standpoint of medical psychology, reaches the same conclusion as Sidgwick from that of ethics.  In a report on the “Value of Chastity for Men,” published as an appendix to the third edition (1899) of his Kontraere Sexualempfindung, the distinguished Berlin physician discusses the matter with much vigorous common sense, insisting that “chaste and unchaste are relative ideas.”  We must not, he states, as is so often done, identify “chaste” with “sexually abstinent.”  He adds that we are not justified in describing all extra-marital sexual intercourse as unchaste, for, if we do so, we shall be compelled to regard nearly all men, and some very estimable women, as unchaste.  He rightly insists that in this matter we must apply the same rule to women as to men, and he points out that even when it involves what may be technically adultery sexual intercourse is not necessarily unchaste.  He takes the case of a girl who, at eighteen, when still mentally immature, is married to a man with whom she finds it impossible to live and a separation consequently occurs, although a divorce may be impossible to obtain.  If she now falls passionately in love with a man her love may be entirely chaste, though it involves what is technically adultery.

In thus understanding asceticism and chastity, and their beneficial functions in life, we see that they occupy a place midway between the artificially exaggerated position they once held and that to which they were degraded by the inevitable reaction of total indifference or actual hostility which followed.  Asceticism and chastity are not rigid categorical imperatives; they are useful means to desirable ends; they are wise and beautiful arts.  They demand our estimation, but not our over-estimation.  For in over-estimating them, it is too often forgotten, we over-estimate the sexual instinct.  The instinct of sex is indeed extremely important.  Yet it has not that all-embracing and supereminent importance which some, even of those who fight against it, are accustomed to believe.  That artificially magnified conception of the sexual impulse is fortified by the artificial emphasis placed upon asceticism.  We may learn the real place of the sexual impulse in learning how we may reasonably and naturally view the restraints on that impulse.

FOOTNOTES: 

[69] For Blake and for Shelley, as well as, it may be added, for Hinton, chastity, as Todhunter remarks in his Study of Shelley, is “a type of submission to the actual, a renunciation of the infinite, and is therefore hated by them.  The chaste man, i.e., the man of prudence and self-control, is the man who has lost the nakedness of his primitive innocence.”