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.


II

We have seen that various popular beliefs and conventional assumptions
concerning the sexual impulse can no longer be maintained. The sexual
activities of the organism are not mere responses to stimulation, absent
if we choose to apply no stimulus, never troubling us if we run away from
them, harmless if we enclose them within a high wall. Nor do they
constitute a mere excretion, or a mere appetite, which we can control by a
crude system of hygiene and dietetics. We better understand the