THE STUDY OF SEX 9 



To bring the facts of sex into broad daylight 

 is obscenity ; to disclose the organic springs 

 of love is to degrade Man to the brute level ; 

 to raise into the focus of consciousness what 

 ought to remain sub-conscious is a " psychical 

 rape." The latest and unforgivable sin of a 

 materialistic and scientific system of education 

 is thus to presume to give any instruction 

 whatever in regard to the process by which 

 the race is continued ! And how much more 

 awful even to broach the subject of the 

 Scylla and Charybdis of adolescence ! 



We should not be writing this little book 

 at all when more agreeable occupations 

 invite us did we not believe that the people 

 perish for lack of knowledge of sex; that 

 it is ignorance, not science, which engenders 

 pruriency and communicates filthy-minded- 

 ness; that for lack of a little instruction 

 many are made miserable when they should 

 be happy, many even ruined, in soul and in 

 body. There is too much mist about the 

 life-journey, from its origins and at its climax 

 mists dark and unwholesome, favouring errors 

 of judgment and errors of conduct ; and of 

 the ever-brightening lights of science there 

 can be few better uses than here and there 

 to guide the wayfarer, even though they 

 may not yet serve to clear all the mists away. 



One appeal we would make to those who 

 dread in sex only the dangers of the knowledge 

 of good and evil, and who, as we think, fail 

 to see that here lies the way towards the tree 

 of life as well. Are not physicians, alienists, 

 and nurses precisely the people who see most 

 of sex in its diseased forms ? But are they 



