mes
of social morality, medicine or science, they should avoid previous
study of their subject in scientific books; that they should follow
the example of de Maupassant and begin by living themselves the
situations which they wish to depict, before beginning to model their
work. Without this they will completely fail in artistic effect, and
will become bad theorists, bad scientists, bad moralists and bad
social politicians, at the same time ceasing to be good artists. If
Maeterlinck's "Life of Bees" is a fine work of art, it is not only
because the author is a distinguished writer, but because he was
himself acquainted with bees, being an apicultor, and did not make his
book a mere compilation of other scientific works.

Along with the struggle against the debasing influence of money and
alcohol, the elevation of the artistic sentiment among the public
will contribute strongly to condemn pornographic "aesthetics." The
false and unnatural sentimentalism, spiced with erotic lewdness, which
is displayed in the trash offered to the public under the title of
"art," fills every man who possesses the least artistic sense with
disgust. Disgust evidently constitutes a beneficial mental medicine in
the domain of art, and we cannot agree with the severe and ascetic
minds who think that true morality has nothing to do with art, or even
that everything moral should be destitute of art. These people are
completely deceived and unwittingly promote pornography, by repelling
humanity with their austerity and driving it to the opposite extreme.
The aesthetic and moral sentiments should be harmoniously combined with
intelligence and will, each of these departments of the mind
participating by its special energies in the elevation of man.

=Anticonceptional Measures from the AEsthetic Point of View.=--In
conclusion, I will refer to a subject which is perhaps not quite in
its place in this chapter. The anticonceptional measures recommended
for reasons of social hygiene, which tend to regulate conceptions and
improve their quality, have been often condemned, sometimes as
immoral, sometimes as contrary to aesthetics. To interfere in this way
with the action of nature is said to injure the poetry of love and the
moral feeling, and at the same time to disturb natural selection.

There are several replies to these objections: In the first place, it
is wrong to maintain that man cannot encroach on the life of nature.
If this were the case, the