There is always an analogy between the instinct of reproduction and the instinct of nutrition. In the matter of eating it is the influence of science, of physiology, which has finally put aside an exaggerated asceticism, and made eating "pure." The same process, as James Hinton well pointed out, has been made possible in the sexual relationships; "science has in its hands the key to purity."[[85]]
Many influences have, however, worked together to favor an insistence on chastity. There has, in the first place, been an inevitable reaction against the sexual facility which had come to be regarded as natural. Such facility was found to have no moral value, for it tended to relaxation of moral fibre and was unfavorable to the finest sexual satisfaction. It could not even claim to be natural in any broad sense of the word, for, in Nature generally, sexual gratification tends to be rare and difficult.[[86]] Courtship is arduous and long, the season of love is strictly delimited, pregnancy interrupts sexual relationships. Even among savages, so long as they have been untainted by civilization, virility is usually maintained by a fine asceticism; the endurance of hardship, self-control and restraint, tempered by rare orgies, constitute a discipline which covers the sexual as well as every other department of savage life. To preserve the same virility in civilized life, it may well be felt, we must deliberately cultivate a virtue which under savage conditions of life is natural.[[87]]
The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of the virtue of chastity in its modern sense. The command: "Be hard," as Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous attitude towards one's self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately accepted ends. "A relative chastity," he wrote, "a fundamental and wise foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[[88]] In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern movement for the restoration of chastity to its proper place as a real and beneficial virtue, and not a mere empty convention. Such a movement could not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious softness in sexual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction. For erotic satisfaction, in its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the sexual impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls "irradiation," that is to say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism. And that can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and direct gratification of sexual desire, by compelling it to increase its force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole soul as well as the whole body has its part. "Only the chaste can be really obscene," said Huysmans. And on a higher plane, only the chaste can really love.
"Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschätzung der Physischen Reinheit," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above primitive conditions. This purity was difficult to preserve in those unsure days; it was rare and unusual. From this rarity rose the superstition of supernatural power residing in the virgin. But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no longer needed to maintain it.... Physical purity can only possess value when it is the result of individual strength of character, and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality."
Konrad Höller, who has given special attention to the sexual question in schools, remarks in relation to physical exercise: "The greatest advantage of physical exercises, however, is not the development of the active and passive strength of the body and its skill, but the establishment and fortification of the authority of the will over the body and its needs, so much given up to indolence. He who has learnt to endure and overcome, for the sake of a definite aim, hunger and thirst and fatigue, will be the better able to withstand sexual impulses and the temptation to gratify them, when better insight and æsthetic feeling have made clear to him, as one used to maintain authority over his body, that to yield would be injurious or disgraceful" (K. Höller, "Die Aufgabe der Volksschule," Sexualpädagogik, p. 70). Professor Schäfenacker (id., p. 102), who also emphasizes the importance of self-control and self-restraint, thinks a youth must bear in mind his future mission, as citizen and father of a family.
A subtle and penetrative thinker of to-day, Jules de Gaultier, writing on morals without reference to this specific question, has discussed what new internal inhibitory motives we can appeal to in replacing the old external inhibition of authority and belief which is now decayed. He answers that the state of feeling on which old faiths were based still persists. "May not," he asks, "the desire for a thing that we love and wish for beneficently replace the belief that a thing is by divine will, or in the nature of things? Will not the presence of a bridle on the frenzy of instinct reveal itself as a useful attitude adopted by instinct itself for its own conservation, as a symptom of the force and health of instinct? Is not empire over oneself, the power of regulating one's acts, a mark of superiority and a motive for self-esteem? Will not this joy of pride have the same authority in preserving the instincts as was once possessed by religious fear and the pretended imperatives of reason?" (Jules de Gaultier, La Dépendance de la Morale et l'Indépendance des Mœurs, p. 153.)
H. G. Wells (in A Modern Utopia), pointing out the importance of chastity, though rejecting celibacy, invokes, like Jules de Gaultier, the motive of pride. "Civilization has developed far more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural perfection of security, liberty, and abundance our civilization has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. Our founders organized motives from all sorts of sources, but I think the chief force to give men self-control is pride. Pride may not be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the best king there, for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they held no appetite must be glutted, no appetite must have artificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between equals as the duty to the race, and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality, that sometimes reduces a couple of people to something jointly less than either."
With regard to chastity as an element of erotic satisfaction, Edward Carpenter writes (Love's Coming of Age, p. 11): "There is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it instantly snatches the same, and destroys in a few moments the form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body, and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."
Beyond its functions in building up character, in heightening and ennobling the erotic life, and in subserving the adequate fulfilment of family and social duties, chastity has a more special value for those who cultivate the arts. We may not always be inclined to believe the writers who have declared that their verse alone is wanton, but their lives chaste. It is certainly true, however, that a relationship of this kind tends to occur. The stuff of the sexual life, as Nietzsche says, is the stuff of art; if it is expended in one channel it is lost for the other. The masters of all the more intensely emotional arts have frequently cultivated a high degree of chastity. This is notably the case as regards music; one thinks of Mozart,[[89]] of Beethoven, of Schubert, and many lesser men. In the case of poets and novelists chastity may usually seem to be less prevalent but it is frequently well-marked, and is not seldom disguised by the resounding reverberations which even the slightest love-episode often exerts on the poetic organism. Goethe's life seems, at a first glance, to be a long series of continuous love-episodes. Yet when we remember that it was the very long life of a man whose vigor remained until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has immortalized he never had actual sexual relationships at all, and when we realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that sexual indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe's life than in that of many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual trace whatever. Sterne, again, declared that he must always have a Dulcinea dancing in his head, yet the amount of his intimate relations with women appears to have been small. Balzac spent his life toiling at his desk and carrying on during many years a love correspondence with a woman he scarcely ever saw and at the end only spent a few months of married life with. The like experience has befallen many artistic creators. For, in the words of Landor, "absence is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty."
We do well to remember that, while the auto-erotic manifestations through the brain are of infinite variety and importance, the brain and the sexual organs are yet the great rivals in using up bodily energy, and that there is an antagonism between extreme brain vigor and extreme sexual vigor, even although they may sometimes both appear at different periods in the same individual.[[90]] In this sense there is no paradox in the saying of Ramon Correa that potency is impotence and impotence potency, for a high degree of energy, whether in athletics or in intellect or in sexual activity, is unfavorable to the display of energy in other directions. Every high degree of potency has its related impotencies.