250 PART V WORKING STAGE. 



instinct should be converted to a saner view of adolescence, 

 a view in closer conformity with fact and the distinctive nature 

 of man. 



After home and school enlightenment, follows the education 

 of young men and women, and finally that of adults and of 

 married folk. Here also a definite conception of the meaning 

 of marriage should render impossible the crude, revolting, and 

 unnatural views which so widely prevail, views portraying men 

 as miserable weaklings incapable of self-restraint and women 

 as the willing slaves to men's lusts. The psychology of the 

 whole matter requires to be assiduously examined. For instance, 

 it appears probable that much sex thought is incidental to the 

 general process of falling into a certain habit of thought and 

 is moreover normally unconnected with sex feelings, and that 

 sexual aberrations are to be primarily explained as matters of 

 depraved thought habits, and not as resulting from perverse sex 

 instincts. Likewise, in an individual who has not been socially 

 drilled into sex emphasis, bodily sex feelings may be present 

 and yet not issue into sex thoughts of any kind which should 

 be the normal experience. Again, bodily sex disturbances during 

 sleep should not normally result in sex dreams, and where they 

 do, it should be remarked that the dream is most frequently an 

 attempted interpretation and not the cause. It is also worthy 

 of consideration that sharply turning away the attention com- 

 monly wipes out any line of thoughts, including sex thoughts, 

 and that turning the attention intently on any bodily sensations, 

 including sex sensations, has the same modifying effect normally. 

 In a word, there is no justification for assuming a kind of fatal 

 connection between sex thoughts and sex feelings, and vice versa. 

 Perhaps most important of all is the psychological effect of a 

 true conception of marriage both before and within marriage 

 a conception restricting sex intimacy to the perpetuation of the 

 race, and the fact that sex demands are freely diminished or 

 heightened by the law of habit. 



Thus a really definite conception of the meaning of marriage, 

 a clear apprehension of its total meaning, may lift many out 

 of the morass into which they have sunk. 



113. Or consider the human problem par excellence, that 

 of conduct, from the point of view of definiteness of thought. 

 Preachers and prophets throughout the ages have vied with 

 one another in lamenting the hardness of men's hearts, their 

 ethical obtuseness, and their disloyalty to the moral law. Espe- 

 cially painful has been the almost universal impression that 

 belief in the ideal, on the one hand, and its realisation in our 

 conduct, on the other, are apparently diametrically opposed to 

 each other, so much so that it has been widely surmised that 

 men and women are by nature corrupt, and therefore incapable 

 of obeying the behests of the ideal. Yet definiteness of thought, 

 or facing the problem as a whole, would have dispelled this 



