164 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



harmless as well as vicious pleasures ; their aim is not the reduction hut 

 the destruction of our natural desires. The joy-loving Greeks deified 

 even the aberrations of our natural instincts ; the ascetic condemns even 

 their legitimate gratifications. In the world of the mind as well as in 

 the wonders of the visible creation, in streams and passions, in woods 

 and dreams, wherever the children of Natui'e sought a god, the anti- 

 naturalists feared a devil ; to the exponents of asceticism life is a pen- 

 alty, and earth the devil's vanity-fair, " a fleeting show, for man's illu- 

 sion given." They make joy a crime, they tell us that God delights 

 in the mortification of his creatures, in the suppression of their natural 

 affections : " If any man hate not his father and mother and wife and 

 children and brothers and sisters, yea, and his own life, he can not be 

 my disciple." 



But this war against Nature is the pendulum's struggle against the 

 law of gravitation ; it is the schoolboy's attempt to obstruct the sources 

 of the Danube. Swinging left, swinging right, the pendulum must 

 return to the middle ; the stream will find its way to the valley athwart 

 all dams, in spite of all obstructions. We can not suppress the sources 

 of a natural instinct ; all we can achieve by such attempts is to divert 

 the stream from its normal course to turn a natural into an unnatural 

 passion. Education, i. e., guidance, does not deserve its name where 

 it is nothing but a blind struggle against Nature. Few parents know 

 how much easier it is to guide than to suppress the natural propensi- 

 ties of a child. Obstinate vices are often merely instincts astray, per- 

 verted energies that might be made innocuous by guiding them back 

 to their proper sphere perverted faculties whose abuse might have 

 been prevented by encouraging their right use. The enemies of Nat- 

 ure seem to believe that an instinct can be deadened by stifling its 

 symptoms, but the history of the last eighteen centuries has demon- 

 strated the fallacy of that principle. They tried to stop the stream : 

 they have only succeeded in turning it from its natural course. The 

 attempt to suppress the pursuit of natural sciences led to the pursuit 

 of >ser7o-sciences to supernaturalism, demonism, and all sorts of 

 hideous chimeras. The monastic exiles from human society peopled 

 their solitude with phantoms. The suppression of healthful pastimes 

 begot a passion for vicious pastimes, and made the fancied identity of 

 sin and pleasure a sad reality. The suppression of rational freedom 

 has led to anarchy : the pendulum swings in the opposite direction to 

 re-establish the due equilibrium. The ordinance of celibacy became 

 the mother of secret vices ; intolerance is the parent of hypocrisy. 

 Wherever asceticism has trampled the flowers of this earth, the soil 

 has produced a rich crop of weeds. The pent-up well-springs of Nat- 

 ure have found new outlets through dark, underground currents that 

 could not fertilize the fields, and have undermined the foundations of 

 many useful buildings before they could regain the light of day. 

 Whatever liberties we now enjoy had thus to force their way through 



