is indeed "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame."

It is not the abnormal or the bizarre that interests most of us to-day. It
is not into the by-ways of vice that we seek to penetrate. It is the normal
exercise of a normal instinct by normal people that interests us: and it is
of this that I have tried to write and speak. The curiosities of depravity
are for the physician and the psychologist to discuss and cure. Ordinary
men and women want first to know how to live ordinary human lives on
a higher level and after a nobler pattern than before. They want, I
think,--and I want,--to grow up, but to grow rightly, beautifully,
humanely.

And I believe the first essential is to realize that the sex-problem, as it
is called, is the problem of something noble, not something base. It is
not a "disagreeable duty" to know our own natures and understand our own
instincts: it is a joy. The sex-instinct is not "the Fall of Man"; neither
is it an instance of divine wisdom on which moralists could, if they had
only been consulted in time, greatly have improved. It is a thing noble in
essence. It is the development of the higher, not the lower, creation. It
is the asexual which is the lower, and the sexually differentiated which is
the higher organism.

In the humbler ranks of being there is no sex, and in a sense no death. The
organism is immortal because--strange paradox--it is not yet alive enough
to die. But as we pass from the lower to the higher, we pass from the less
individual to the more individual; from asexual to sexual. And with this
change comes that great rhythm by which life and death succeed each other,
and death is the _cost_ of life, and to bring life into the world means
sacrifice; and--as we rise higher still--to sustain life means prolonged
and altruistic love. This is the history of sex and of procreation, a