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, the genuine cases in which sexual phenomena of some kind or other fail to manifest themselves being simply cases of inborn lack of sexual sensibility. He met, indeed, a few people who seemed exceptions to the general rule, but, on better knowledge, he found that he was mistaken, and that so far from being absent in these people the sexual instinct was present even in its crudest shapes. The activity of sex is an activity that on the physical side is generated by the complex mechanism of the ductless glands and displayed in the whole organism, physical and psychic, of the individual, who cannot abolish that activity, although to some extent able to regulate the forms in which it is manifested, so that purity cannot be the abolition or even the indefinite suspension of sexual manifestations; it must be the wise and beautiful control of them.
It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.
