p. 173).  But this fact can scarcely be invoked as an argument in favor of the advantages of sexual abstinence among the ordinary population.  J.F.  Scott selects Jesus, Newton, Beethoven, and Kant as “men of vigor and mental acumen who have lived chastely as bachelors.”  It cannot, however, be said that Dr. Scott has been happy in the four figures whom he has been able to select from the whole history of human genius as examples of life-long sexual abstinence.  We know little with absolute certainty of Jesus, and even if we reject the diagnosis which Professor Binet-Sangle (in his Folie de Jesus) has built up from a minute study of the Gospels, there are many reasons why we should refrain from emphasizing the example of his sexual abstinence; Newton, apart from his stupendous genius in a special field, was an incomplete and unsatisfactory human being who ultimately reached a condition very like insanity; Beethoven was a thoroughly morbid and diseased man, who led an intensely unhappy existence; Kant, from first to last, was a feeble valetudinarian.  It would probably be difficult to find a healthy normal man who would voluntarily accept the life led by any of these four, even as the price of their fame.  J.A.  Godfrey (Science of Sex, pp. 139-147) discusses at length the question whether sexual abstinence is favorable to ordinary intellectual vigor, deciding that it is not, and that we cannot argue from the occasional sexual abstinence of men of genius, who are often abnormally constituted, and physically below the average, to the normally developed man.  Sexual abstinence, it may be added, is by no means always a favorable sign, even in men who stand intellectually above the average.  “I have not obtained the impression,” remarks Freud (Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908), “that sexual abstinence is helpful to energetic and independent men of action or original thinkers, to courageous liberators or reformers.  The sexual conduct of a man is often symbolic of his whole method of reaction in the world.  The man who energetically grasps the object of his sexual desire may be trusted to show a similarly relentless energy in the pursuit of other aims.”

Many, though not all, who deny that prolonged sexual abstinence is harmless, include women in this statement.  There are some authorities indeed who believe that, whether or not any conscious sexual desire is present, sexual abstinence is less easily tolerated by women than by men.[94]

Cabanis, in his famous and pioneering work, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, said in 1802, that women not only bear sexual excess more easily than men, but sexual privations with more difficulty, and a cautious and experienced observer of to-day, Loewenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, 1899, p. 53), while not considering that normal women bear sexual abstinence less easily than men, adds that this is not the case with women of neuropathic disposition, who suffer much more from