e been discarded by a very wide and, in the case of some of them,
unanimous judgment that they are harmful. On the other hand, in the
_Avesta_ spermatorrhea is a crime punished by stripes.[1381] The most
civilized peoples also maintain, by virtue of their superior position in
the arts of life, that they have attained to higher and better judgments
and that they may judge the customs of others from their own standpoint.
For three or four centuries they have called their own customs
"Christian," and have thus claimed for them a religious authority and
sanction which they do not possess by any connection with the principles
of Christianity. Now, however, the adjective seems to be losing its
force. The Japanese regard nudity with indifference, but they use dress
to conceal the contour of the human form while we use it to enhance, in
many ways, the attraction. "Christian" mores have been enforced by the
best breechloaders and ironclads, but the Japanese now seem ready to
bring superiority in those matters to support their mores. It is now a
known and recognized fact that our missionaries have unintentionally and
unwittingly done great harm to nature people by inducing them to wear
clothes as one of the first details of civilized influence. In the
usages of nature peoples there is no correlation at all between dress
and sentiments of chastity, modesty, decency, and propriety.[1382]

+440. Natural functions.+ The fact that human beings have natural
functions the exercise of which is unavoidable but becomes harmful to
other human beings, in a rapidly advancing ratio, as greater and greater
numbers are collected within close neighborhood to each other, makes it
necessary that natural functions shall be regulated by rules and
conventions. The passionate nature of the sex appetite, by virtue of
which it tends to excess and vice, forces men to connect it with taboos
and regulations which also are conventional and institutional. The
taboos of chastity, decency, propriety, and modesty, and those on all
sex relations are therefore adjustments to facts of human nature and
conditions of human life. It is never correct to regard any one of the
taboos as an arbitrary invention or burden laid on society by tradition
without necessity. Very many of them are due originally to vanity,
superstition, or primitive magic, wholly or in part, but they have been
sifted for centuries by experience, and those which we have received and
accepted are suc