yield. The physiologist dreads to see the costly experiment tried. The
urgent reformer, who cares less for human suffering and human life
than for the trial of his theories, will regard the experiment with
equanimity if not with complacency.

If, then, the identical co-education of the sexes is condemned both by
physiology and experience, may it not be that their _special and
appropriate co-education_ would yield a better result than their
special and appropriate _separate_ education? This is a most important
question, and one difficult to resolve. The discussion of it must be
referred to those who are engaged in the practical work of
instruction, and the decision will rest with experience. Physiology
advocates, as we have seen, the special and appropriate education of
the sexes, and has only a single word to utter with regard to simple
co-education, or juxtaposition in education.

That word is with regard to the common belief in the danger of
improprieties and scandal as a part of co-education. There is some
danger in this respect; but not a serious or unavoidable one.
Doubtless there would be occasional lapses in a double-sexed college;
and so there are outside of schoolhouses and seminaries of learning.
Even the church and the clergy are not exempt from reproach in such
things. There are sects, professing to commingle religion and love,
who illustrate the dangers of juxtaposition even in things holy. "No
physiologist can well doubt that the holy kiss of love in such cases
owes all its warmth to the sexual feeling which consciously or
unconsciously inspires it, or that the mystical union of the sexes
lies very close to a union that is nowise mystical, when it does not
lead to madness."[31] There is less, or certainly no more danger in
having the sexes unite at the repasts of knowledge, than, as Plautus