out under certain arbitrary external conditions, which render it licit or illicit.  An act of sexual intercourse under the name of “marriage” is beneficial; the very same act, under the name of “incontinence,” is pernicious.  No physiological process, and still less any spiritual process, can bear such restriction.  It is as much as to say that a meal becomes good or bad, digestible or indigestible, according as a grace is or is not pronounced before the eating of it.

It is deplorable because, such a conception being essentially unreal, an element of unreality is thus introduced into a matter of the gravest concern alike to the individual and to society.  Artificial disputes have been introduced where no matter of real dispute need exist.  A contest has been carried on marked by all the ferocity which marks contests about metaphysical or pseudo-metaphysical differences having no concrete basis in the actual world.  As will happen in such cases, there has, after all, been no real difference between the disputants because the point they quarreled over was unreal.  In truth each side was right and each side was wrong.

It is necessary, we see, that the balance should be held even.  An absolute license is bad; an absolute abstinence—­even though some by nature or circumstances are urgently called to adopt it—­is also bad.  They are both alike away from the gracious equilibrium of Nature.  And the force, we see, which naturally holds this balance even is the biological fact that the act of sexual union is the satisfaction of the erotic needs, not of one person, but of two persons.

FOOTNOTES: 

[92] This view was an ambiguous improvement on the view, universally prevalent, as Westermarck has shown, among primitive peoples, that the sexual act involves indignity to a woman or depreciation of her only in so far as she is the property of another person who is the really injured party.

[93] This implicit contradiction has been acutely pointed out from the religious side by the Rev. H. Northcote, Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 53.

[94] It has already been necessary to discuss this point briefly in “The Sexual Impulse in Women,” vol. iii of these Studies.

[95] “Die Abstinentia Sexualis,” Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Nov., 1908.

[96] P. Janet, “La Maladie du Scrupule,” Revue Philosophique, May, 1901.

[97] S. Freud, Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908.  As Adele Schreiber also points out (Mutterschutz, Jan., 1907, p. 30), it is not enough to prove that abstinence is not dangerous; we have to remember that the spiritual and physical energy used up in repressing this mighty instinct often reduces a joyous and energetic nature to a weary and faded shadow.  Similarly, Helene Stoecker (Die Liebe und die Frauen, p. 105) says:  “The question whether abstinence is harmful is, to say the truth, a ridiculous question.  One needs to be no nervous specialist to know, as a matter of course, that a life of happy love and marriage is the healthy life, and its complete absence cannot fail to lead to severe psychic depression, even if no direct physiological disturbances can be demonstrated.”