CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA 147 



we are now beginning seriously to criticise. 

 Morbid tendencies accumulate. The arti- 

 ficiality and injuriousness of many human 

 activities must necessarily provoke peculiar 

 aberrations. The occupational factor in the 

 production of sexual vice is well known. 

 Just as man has to pay for his fine brain by 

 liability to nervous break-down of many sorts, 

 so he has to pay for that highly evolved 

 emotional complex which we call " love " by 

 liability to vice. " The lunatic, the lover, 

 and the poet are of imagination all com- 

 pact. ..." Love at its best is a very complex 

 and subtle thing; and just because of this 

 it is very apt to go wrong. As Finot says : 

 " The chaste, beautiful, and invisible Diana 

 becomes the monstrous Hecate, the foe of 

 light; Aphrodite vanishes in the voluptuous 

 mysteries of Astarte." 



Another point of importance is that sexual 

 activity is seasonally punctuated in most 

 animals, in most cases indeed suspended for 

 the greater part of the year, whereas in man 

 it has almost ceased to have any relation to 

 times and seasons. This in itself is a great 

 danger, and it is augmented when sexual 

 appetite outlives its natural span of years. 

 Man is, in fact, the most domesticated of 

 animals, though these, dogs, cats and fowls 

 especially, seem increasingly to acquire his 

 continuous sexual possibility throughout the 

 seasons. Nor is this altogether a wonder, 

 since it is of the very nature of domestication 

 to overcome the peculiar difficulties of the 

 seasons to wild life. Moreover, this spreading 

 of the breeding season throughout the year 



