asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found even—­indeed often in a high degree—­among savages, has its main moral justification as one aid to sublimation.  Throughout life sublimation acts by transforming some part at all events of the creative sexual energy from its elementary animal manifestations into more highly individual and social manifestations, or at all events into finer forms of sexual activity, forms that seem to us more beautiful and satisfy us more widely.  Purity, we thus come to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation, not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into forms of which our best judgment may approve.

[7] We may gather the history of the term from the Oxford Dictionary.  Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit “by sublimation strange,” and Ben Jonson in Cynthia’s Revels spoke of a being “sublimated and refined”; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same seventeenth century, referred to religion as “sublimating” human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a little later, to “subliming” marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury, early in the eighteenth century, spoke of human nature being “sublimated by a sort of spiritual chemists” and Welton, a little later, of “a love sublimate and refined,” while, finally, and altogether in our modern sense, Peacock in 1816 in his Headlong Hall referred to “that enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of greatness and energy.”

We must not suppose—­as is too often assumed—­that sublimation can be carried out easily, completely, or even with unmixed advantage.  If it were so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist would be confronted by few difficulties, but we have ample reason to believe that it is not so.  It is with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who yet attaches great importance to sublimation, as it is with heat in our machines:  only a certain proportion can be transformed into work.  Or, as it is put by Loewenfeld, who is not a constructive philosopher but a careful and cautious medical investigator, the advantages of sublimation are not received in specially high degree by those who permanently deny to their sexual impulse every natural direct relief.  The celibate Catholic clergy, notwithstanding their heroic achievements in individual cases, can scarcely be said to display a conspicuous excess of intellectual energy, on the whole, over the non-celibate Protestant clergy; or, if we compare the English clergy before and after the Protestant Reformation, though the earlier period may reveal more daring and brilliant personages, the whole intellectual output of the later Church may claim comparison with that of the earlier Church.  There are clearly other factors at work besides sublimation, and even sublimation may act most potently, not when the sexual activities sink or are driven into a tame and monotonous subordination, but rather when they assume a splendid energy which surges into many channels.  Yet sublimation is a very real influence, not only in its more unconscious and profound operations, but in its more immediate and temporary applications, as part of an athletic discipline, acting best perhaps when it acts most automatically, to utilise the motor energy of the organism in the attainment of any high physical or psychic achievement.