earth would now be a virgin forest and a
great many animals and plants would not have been adapted to the use
of man. Our fields, our gardens and our domestic animals would die,
instead of bearing fruit and multiplying as they do at present. The
naturalist has much more fear of seeing rare and interesting wild
plants and animals exterminated from the face of the earth by the
egoistic and pitiless hand of man. He seeks in vain the means of
checking this work of destruction.

We have proved without the least deference, often with a brutal hand,
to the misfortune of art and poetry, that we are capable of
successfully intermeddling with the machinery of nature, even in what
concerns our own persons. I shall not return here to the subject of
ethics. In Chapter XV, I have sufficiently shown how false is our
present sexual morality, and I have proved in Chapter XIV the absolute
necessity of measures to regulate conception in order to realize an
efficacious social sexual morality.

The aesthetic argument appears at first sight more valid; it is
unnecessary, however, to discuss matters of taste. Spectacles are
certainly not particularly aesthetic; nevertheless the poetry of love
does not suffer much from their use, and when one is shortsighted or
longsighted one cannot do without them. Great artists wear spectacles.
It is the same with false teeth, with clothes, with bicycles and a
hundred other artificial things which man makes use of to make his
life more easy. So long as they are novel and unusual they wound the
aesthetic sentiment; but when we become accustomed to them we no longer
take notice of them. Man has even come to regard as aesthetic, women's
corsets which deform their chests, and pointed shoes which deform the
feet. I am certain that the first man who mounted a horse was accused
by his contemporaries of committing an act contrary to aesthetics!

From all points of view, the details of coitus leave much to be
desired from the aesthetic point of view, and such a slight addition as
a membranous protective does not appear to make any serious
difference. It is impossible for me to recognize the validity of such
an objection, which I attribute to the prejudice against anything
which disturbs our habits.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] See also Lameere "_L'Evolution des ornements sexuels_," 1904.

[16] "Die Anfaenge der Kunst und die Theorie Darwins." _Hessiche
Blaetter fuer Volkskunde_, Vol. III, Part 2.

CHAPTER XIX