Yet in its vagueness the proposition is a little disingenuous; it condescends to no definitions and no qualifications; it fails even to make clear how it is to be reconciled with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is beautiful how can marriage make it cease to be so?
Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common source far back in the primitive human world.

All the emanations of the human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual.

The manifestations of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous.

Therefore the things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror and awe, of impurity and of purity.

They seemed so highly charged with magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet none to which they were impelled to give more thought.