disease.  We must perfect these bodies and make them fine instruments of the mind and the spirit.  Only thus, when the body becomes an aid instead of a hindrance to human expression may we attain any civilization worthy of the name.  Only thus may we create our bodies a fitting temple for the soul, which is nothing but a vague unreality except insofar as it is able to manifest itself in the beauty of the concrete.

Once we have accomplished the first tentative steps toward the creation of a real civilization, the task of freeing the spirit of mankind from the bondage of ignorance, prejudice and mental passivity which is more fettering now than ever in the history of humanity, will be facilitated a thousand-fold.  The great central problem, and one which must be taken first is the abolition of the shame and fear of sex.  We must teach men the overwhelming power of this radiant force.  We must make them understand that uncontrolled, it is a cruel tyrant, but that controlled and directed, it may be used to transmute and sublimate the everyday world into a realm of beauty and joy.  Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise.  So must we necessarily and inevitably conceive of sex-expression.  The instinct is here.  None of us can avoid it.  It is in our power to make it a thing of beauty and a joy forever:  or to deny it, as have the ascetics of the past, to revile this expression and then to pay the penalty, the bitter penalty that Society to-day is paying in innumerable ways.

If I am criticized for the seeming “selfishness” of this conception it will be through a misunderstanding.  The individual is fulfiling his duty to society as a whole by not self-sacrifice but by self-development.  He does his best for the world not by dying for it, not by increasing the sum total of misery, disease and unhappiness, but by increasing his own stature, by releasing a greater energy, by being active instead of passive, creative instead of destructive.  This is fundamentally the greatest truth to be discovered by womankind at large.  And until women are awakened to their pivotal function in the creation of a new civilization, that new era will remain an impossible and fantastic dream.  The new civilization can become a glorious reality only with the awakening of woman’s now dormant qualities of strength, courage, and vigor.  As a great thinker of the last century pointed out, not only to her own health and happiness is the physical degeneracy of woman destructive, but to our whole race.  The physical and psychic power of woman is more indispensable to the well-being and power of the human race than that even of man, for the strength and happiness of the child is more organically united with that of the mother.