ement. This cleavage has
become so nearly universal that we are hardly conscious of its profound
perversity. It is the arch-sin of all higher eroticism to realise beauty
not as the undetachable and self-evident outward form of a beloved soul,
but as a means of heightening pleasure. Although in its essence it is
the same thing as the examination of a work of art merely for the sake
of the pleasure it affords to the senses, the offence is here aggravated
because personality is involved. This degradation of the higher values,
whether of nature, art, beauty, knowledge, kindness, religion or the
human soul, to serve the ends of sensual pleasure is the expression of a
perversity which is possibly the most radical and characteristic of our
age. To-day the soul of a woman has frequently the same effect on man as
her physical beauty; he enjoys it as a subtile charm instead of
respecting it as a mystery.

I can hardly expect to make my meaning quite clear to the multitude, but
the tendency to enjoy beauty of form or soul as a distinct element
represents a rupture with the principle of synthetic love, the love
which does not separate but realises the personality of the beloved as
an indivisible entity. The enjoyment of beauty as a separate element
pre-supposes a conscious, spiritual division, not only of the beloved,
but also of the lover, and is therefore the destruction of the principle
of unity. Aesthete and libertine alike sink to the lower level of
pleasure, and their emotions become obscene. There is no question of a
division when Tristan in his vision of Isolde exclaims, "How beautiful
thou art!" For great love can create the beauty of the beloved out of
its own soul.

Prudery is based on a similar duality. It expresses a consciousness that
the nude can only be alluring, obscene, "indecent," and should therefore
be feared and avoided. It is the defensive weapon of sexually excited,
for the most part, slightly hysterical women, against the purely sexual,
whose sphere they often extend amazingly. Prudery conceives sexuality as
a distinct, restricted complex in consciousness. Such division is alien
to woman and, where it exists, a hysterical condition, a condition of
inner discord, is clearly indicated. We may take it that the obscene
which affects normal men, affects only hysterical, inwardly discordant
women who try to take shelter behind prudery. To the normal woman the
obscene does not exist as a spiritual principle; she