do either.  This fact is the source of many degrees and varieties of energy and formative power in the organism.  Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces which build up the man’s and woman’s distinctively sexual constitution:  the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the varying emotional desires and needs.  It is in the complex play of these secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical and psychic development, the various approximations of the male to female bodily and emotional disposition, of the female to the male, all the numerous gradations that occur, naturally as we now see, between the complete man and the complete woman.

When we turn the light of this new conception on to our old ideas of purity,—­to the virtue or the vice, accordingly as we may have been pleased to consider it, of sexual abstinence,—­we begin to see that those ideas need radical revision.  They appear in a new light, their whole meaning is changed.  No doubt it may be said they never had the validity they appeared to possess, even when we judge them by the crudest criterion, that of practice.  Thus, while it is the rule for physicians to proclaim the advantages of sexual continence, there is no good reason to believe that they have themselves practised it in any eminent degree.  A few years ago an inquiry among thirty-five distinguished physicians, chiefly German and Russian, showed that they were nearly all of opinion that continence is harmless, if not beneficial.  But Meirowsky found by inquiry of eighty-six physicians, of much the same nationalities, that only one had himself been sexually abstinent before marriage.  There seem to be no similar statistics for the English-speaking countries, where there exists a greater modesty—­though not perhaps notably less need for it—­in the making of such confessions.  But if we turn to the allied profession which is strongly on the side of sexual abstinence, we find that among theological students, as has been shown in the United States, while prostitution may be infrequent, no temptation is so frequent or so potent, and in most cases so irresistible, as that to solitary sexual indulgence.  Such is the actual attitude towards the two least ideal forms of sexual practice—­as distinguished from mere theory—­on the part of the two professions which most definitely pronounce in favour of continence.

It is necessary, however, as will now be clearer, to set our net more widely.  We must take into consideration every form and degree of sexual manifestation, normal and abnormal, gross and ethereal.  When we do this, even cautiously and without going far afield, sexual abstinence is found to be singularly elusive.  Rohleder, a careful and conscientious investigator, has asserted that such abstinence, in the true and complete sense, is absolutely non-existent,