not objectively realised, but
is looked upon with the eyes of the senses. The moment personality is
acknowledged as the only decisive factor in erotic life, chaotic
impersonal sensuality stands condemned. The obscene is the darker aspect
of modern love, and without modern love it could not exist. Its essence
is negative, is the tendency to caricature and mock the highest form of
love. The photograph of a nude woman is not obscene; but if the face is
hidden, and thus the personal moment intentionally eliminated in favour
of the generic element, it approaches the obscene. This accounts for the
widely felt pleasure in obscene pictures; the beholder is not personally
engaged, he can enjoy these pictures without taking upon his shoulders
any kind of responsibility. Even that minimum of respect which the very
dregs of humanity may claim is not required of him. The picture is
capable of affording pleasure without claiming a grain of human
kindness. Thus it would seem that sensual pleasure is possible without
any sacrifice of the inwardly professed higher eroticism, a sacrifice
which might be a bar to a primitive relationship with a woman of flesh
and blood. Actually, however, it is not possible, for with the surrender
to the base source of enjoyment, the spiritual position is abandoned,
and personally conceived humanity inwardly annihilated.

It follows from the foregoing that the fascination of the obscene can
only be fully felt by one who has completely acknowledged the principle
of personality in eroticism, and who has also latent within him the
possibility of erotic dualism. The more highly evolved the emotional
life of a man (all these considerations apply only to a man in whom the
possibility of dualism is latent), the more will he realise the purely
sexual, the emphasis of the element of pleasure, as something unseemly
and disagreeable; something which he ought to deny himself, but which
attracts him with the irresistible fascination of the obscene. The man
who surrenders himself naively to sensuality does not realise it as
obscene, but the man who, conscious of his higher concept, strives
against it, experiences the reaction of sensuality with the full force
of its perverse seduction. Even if only for a brief space, he
annihilates the higher element and gives himself up to the pleasure of
the base and degraded.

In this connection we are face to face with the strange but still
logical fact, that a man who has complete