masculine conceptions of
modesty. "In the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a
moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex,
the intuition of her moral superiority and cannot understand why
she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the
laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if
nakedness should, or should not, affright her. A sort of confused
atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was
known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of
that human epoch" (Celine Renooz, _Psychologie Comparee de
l'Homme et de la Femme_, pp. 85-87). Perhaps this was obscurely
felt by the German girl (mentioned in Kalbeck's _Life of
Brahms_), who said: "One enjoys music twice as much
_decolletee_."

From the point of view with which we are here essentially concerned there
are three ways in which the cultivation of nakedness--so far as it is
permitted by the slow education of public opinion--tends to exert an
influence: (1) It is an important element in the sexual hygiene of the
young, introducing a wholesome knowledge and incuriosity into a sphere
once given up to prudery and pruriency. (2) The effect of nakedness is
beneficial on those of more mature age, also, in so far as it tends to
cultivate the sense of beauty and to furnish the tonic and consoling
influences of natural vigor and grace. (3) The custom of nakedness, in its
inception at all events, has a dynamic psychological influence also on
morals, an influence exerted in the substitution of a strenuous and
positive morality for the merely negative and timid morality which has
ruled in this sphere.

Perhaps there are not many adults who realize the intense and secret
absorption of thought in the minds of many boys and some girls concerning
the problem of the physical conformation of the other sex, and the time,
patience, and intellectual energy which they are willing to expend on the
solution of this problem. This is mostly effected in secret, but not
seldom the secret impulse manifests itself with a sudden violence which in
the blind eyes of the law is reckoned as crime. A German lawyer, Dr.
Werthauer, has lately stated that if there were a due degree of
familiarity with the natural organs and functions of the opposite sex
ninety per cent. of the indecent acts of youths with girl children would
disappear, for in most cases these are n