ally whether, on the whole, modesty really
becomes a more prominent emotion as civilization advances. I do not think
this position can be maintained. It is a great mistake, as we have seen,
to suppose that in becoming extended modesty also becomes intensified. On
the contrary, this very extension is a sign of weakness. Among savages,
modesty is far more radical and invincible than among the civilized. Of
the Araucanian women of Chile, Treutler has remarked that they are
distinctly more modest than the Christian white population, and such
observations might be indefinitely extended. It is, as we have already
noted, in a new and crude civilization, eager to mark its separation from
a barbarism it has yet scarcely escaped, that we find an extravagant and
fantastic anxiety to extend the limits of modesty in life, and art, and
literature. In older and more mature civilizations--in classical
antiquity, in old Japan, in France--modesty, while still a very real
influence, becomes a much less predominant and all-pervading influence. In
life it becomes subservient to human use, in art to beauty, in literature
to expression.

Among ourselves we may note that modesty is a much more invincible motive
among the lower social classes than among the more cultivated classes.
This is so even when we should expect the influence of occupation to
induce familiarity. Thus I have been told of a ballet-girl who thinks it
immodest to bathe in the fashion customary at the seaside, and cannot make
up her mind to do so, but she appears on the stage every night in tights
as a matter of course; while Fanny Kemble, in her _Reminiscences_, tells
of an actress, accustomed to appear in tights, who died a martyr to
modesty rather than allow a surgeon to see her inflamed knee. Modesty is,
indeed, a part of self-respect, but in the fully-developed human being
self-respect itself holds in check any excessive modesty.[72]

We must remember, moreover, that there are more definite grounds for the
subordination of modesty with the development of civilization. We have
seen that the factors of modesty are many, and that most of them are based
on emotions which make little urgent appeal save to races in a savage or
barbarous condition. Thus, disgust, as Richet has truly pointed out,
necessarily decreases as knowledge increases.[73] As we analyze and
understand our experiences better, so they cause us less disgust. A rotten
egg is disgusting, but the chemist feels n