er finer
tempered peoples of antiquity in realizing the moral, as well as the
pedagogic, hygienic, and aesthetic advantages[44] of admitting into life
the spectacle of the naked human body. But unless we do we hopelessly
fetter ourselves in our march along the road of civilization, we deprive
ourselves at once of a source of moral strength and of joyous inspiration.
Just as Wesley once asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, so
to-day men are beginning to ask why the human body, the most divine melody
at its finest moments that creation has yielded, should be allowed to
become the perquisite of those who lust for the obscene. And some are,
further, convinced that by enlisting it on the side of purity and strength
they are raising the most powerful of all bulwarks against the invasion of
a vicious conception of life and the consequent degradation of sex. These
are considerations which we cannot longer afford to neglect, however great
the opposition they arouse among the unthinking.

"Folk are afraid of such things rousing the passions," Edward
Carpenter remarks. "No doubt the things may act that way. But
why, we may ask, should people be afraid of rousing passions
which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?" It
is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral
formulae are no longer strong enough to control passion
adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is
cankered with rust. "The cure is not to cut off the passions, or
to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy
engine of general morality and common sense within which they
will work" (Edward Carpenter, _Albany Review_, Sept., 1907).

So far as I am aware, however, it was James Hinton who chiefly
sought to make clear the possibility of a positive morality on
the basis of nakedness, beauty, and sexual influence, regarded as
dynamic forces which, when suppressed, make for corruption and
when wisely used serve to inspire and ennoble life. He worked out
his thoughts on this matter in MSS., written from about 1870 to
his death two years later, which, never having been prepared for
publication, remain in a fragmentary state and have not been
published. I quote a few brief characteristic passages: "Is not,"
he wrote, "the Hindu refusal to see a woman eating strangely like
ours to see one naked? The real sensual