all these we may obtain while still preserving our common-sense....  Such nakedness would demand corresponding institutions, strong and simple, and a great respect for those conventions which belong to all times” (Senancour, De l’Amour, vol. i, p. 314).

From that time onwards references to the value and desirability of nakedness become more and more frequent in all civilized countries, sometimes mingled with sarcastic allusions to the false conventions we have inherited in this matter.  Thus Thoreau writes in his journal on June 12, 1852, as he looks at boys bathing in the river:  “The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing.  I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water.  As yet we have not man in Nature.  What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties.”

Iwan Bloch, in Chapter VII of his Sexual Life of Our Time, discusses this question of nakedness from the modern point of view, and concludes:  “A natural conception of nakedness:  that is the watchword of the future.  All the hygienic, aesthetic, and moral efforts of our time are pointing in that direction.”

Stratz, as befits one who has worked so strenuously in the cause of human health and beauty, admirably sets forth the stage which we have now attained in this matter.  After pointing out (Die Frauenkleidung, third edition, 1904, p. 30) that, in opposition to the pagan world which worshipped naked gods, Christianity developed the idea that nakedness was merely sexual, and therefore immoral, he proceeds:  “But over all glimmered on the heavenly heights of the Cross, the naked body of the Saviour.  Under that protection there has gradually disengaged itself from the confusion of ideas a new transfigured form of nakedness made free after long struggle.  I would call this artistic nakedness, for as it was immortalized by the old Greeks through art, so also among us it has been awakened to new life by art.  Artistic nakedness is, in its nature, much higher than either the natural or the sensual conception of nakedness.  The simple child of Nature sees in nakedness nothing at all; the clothed man sees in the uncovered body only a sensual irritation.  But at the highest standpoint man consciously returns to Nature, and recognizes that under the manifold coverings of human fabrication there is hidden the most splendid creature that God has created.  One may stand in silent, worshipping wonder before the sight; another may be impelled to imitate and show to his fellow-man what in that holy moment he has seen.  But both enjoy the spectacle of human beauty with full consciousness and enlightened purity of thought.”

It was not, however, so much on these more spiritual sides, but on the side of hygiene, that the nineteenth century furnished its chief practical contribution to the new attitude towards nakedness.