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possesses a high and, indeed, symptomatic value, for "its
presence shows that according to the measure of a man's ideal
personality, his valuations are established."
Dugas goes further, and asserts that the ideals of modesty
develop with human development, and forever take on new and finer
forms. "There is," he declares, "a very close relationship
 between naturalness, or sincerity, and modesty, for in love,
naturalness is the ideal attained, and modesty is only the fear
of coming short of that ideal. Naturalness is the sign and the
test of perfect love. It is the sign of it, for, when love can
show itself natural and true, one may conclude that it is
purified of its unavowable imperfections or defects, of its alloy
of wretched and petty passions, its grossness, its chimerical
notions, that it has become strong and healthy and vigorous. It
is the ordeal of it, for to show itself natural, to be always
true, without shrinking, it must have all the lovable qualities,
and have them without seeking, as a second nature. What we call
'natural,' is indeed really acquired; it is the gift of a
physical and moral evolution which it is precisely the object of
modesty to keep. Modesty is the feeling of the true, that is to
say, of the healthy, in love; it long exists as a vision, not yet
attained; vague, yet sufficiently clear for all that deviates
from it to be repelled as offensive and painful. At first, a
remote and seemingly inaccessible ideal, as it comes nearer it
grows human and individual, and emerges from the region of dream,
ceasing not to be loved as ideal, even when it is possessed as
real.
"At first sight, it seems paradoxical to define modesty as an
aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary, to
be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the problem,
we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal functions,
disengaged from its superstitions, its variegated customs and
prejudices, the true modesty of simple and healthy natures, as
far removed from prudery as from immodesty. And what we term the
natural, or the true in love, is the singular mingling of two
forms of imaginations, wrongly supposed to be incompatible: ideal
aspiration and the sense for the realities of life. Thus defined,
modesty not only repudiates that cold and dissolving criticism
which deprives love of all poetry, and prepares the way for a
brutal realism; it also excludes that light and detached
imagination which floats above love, the mere idealism of heroic
sentiments, which cherishes poetic illusions, and passes, without
seeing it, the love that is real and alive. True modesty implies
a love not addressed to the heroes of vain romances, but to
living people, with their feet on the earth. But on the other
hand, modesty is the respect of love; if it is not shocked by
its physical necessities, if it accepts physiological and
 psychological conditions, it also maintains the ideal of those
moral proprieties outside of which, for all of us, love cannot be
enjoyed. When love is really felt, and not vainly imagined,
modesty is the requirement of an ideal of dignity, conceived as
the very condition of that love. Separate modesty from love, that
is, from love which is not floating in the air, but crystallized
around a real person, and its psychological reality, its poignant
and tragic character, disappears." (Dugas, "La Pudeur," _Revue
Philosophique_, Nov., 1903.) So conceived, modesty becomes a
virtue, almost identical with the Roman _modestia_.
FOOTNOTES:
[72] Freud remarks that one may often hear, concerning elderly ladies,
that in their youth in the country, they suffered, almost to collapse,
from hæmorrhages from the genital passage, because they were too modest to
seek medical advice and examination; he adds that it is extremely rare to
find such an attitude among our young women to-day. (S. Freud, _Zur
Neurosenlehre_, 1906, p. 182.) It would be easy to find evidence of the
disappearance of misplaced signs of modesty formerly prevalent, although
this mark of increasing civilization has not always penetrated to our laws
and regulations.
[73] "Disgust," he remarks, "is a sort of synthesis which attaches to the
total form of objects, and which must diminish and disappear as scientific
analysis separates into parts what, as a whole, is so repugnant."
[74] Sénancour, _De l'Amour_, 1834, vol. i, p. 316. He remarks that a
useless and false reserve is due to stupidity rather than to modesty.
THE PHENOMENA OF SEXUAL PERIODICITY.
I.
The Various Physiological and Psychological Rhythms--Menstruation--The
Alleged Influence of the Moon--Frequent Suppression of Menstruation among
Primitive Races--Mittelschmerz--Possible Tendency to a Future
Intermenstrual Cycle--Menstruation among Animals--Menstruating Monkeys and
Apes--What is Menstruation--Its Primary Cause Still Obscure--The Relation
of Menstruation to Ovulation--The Occasional Absence of Menstruation in
Health--The Relation of Menstruation to "Heat"--The Prohibition of
Intercourse during Menstruation--The Predominance of Sexual Excitement at
and around the Menstrual Period--Its Absence during the Period Frequently
Apparent only.
Throughout the vegetable and animal worlds the sexual functions are
periodic. From the usually annual period of flowering in plants, with its
play of sperm-cell and germ-cell and consequent seed-production, through
the varying sexual energies of animals, up to the monthly effervescence of
the generative organism in woman, seeking not without the shedding of
blood for the gratification of its reproductive function, from first to
last we find unfailing evidence of the periodicity of sex. At first the
sun, and then, as some have thought, the moon, have marked throughout a
rhythmic impress on the phenomena of sex. To understand these phenomena we
have not only to recognize the bare existence of that periodic fact, but
to realize its implications.
Rhythm, it is scarcely necessary to remark, is far from characterizing
sexual activity alone. It is the character of all biological activity,
alike on the physical and the psychic sides. All the organs of the body
appear to be in a perpetual process of rhythmic contraction and expansion.
The heart is rhythmic, so is the respiration. The spleen is rhythmic, so
also the bladder. The uterus constantly undergoes regular rhythmic
contractions at brief intervals. The vascular system, down to the smallest
capillaries, is acted on by three series of vibrations, and every
separate fragment of muscular tissue possesses rhythmic contractility.
Growth itself is rhythmic, and, as Malling-Hansen and subsequent observers
have found, follows a regular annual course as well as a larger cycle. On
the psychic sides attention is rhythmic. We are always irresistibly
compelled to impart a rhythm to every succession of sounds, however
uniform and monotonous. A familiar example of this is the rhythm we can [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]