accept their
opinions in more or less diluted versions, or at all events never made any
definite protest against them.

Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now
beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions. R. de
Graef in the Preface to his famous treatise on the generative organs of
women, _De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus_, dedicated to
Cosmo III de Medici in 1672, considered it necessary to apologize for the
subject of his work. Even a century later, Linnaeus in his great work, _The
System of Nature_, dismissed as "abominable" the exact study of the female
genitals, although he admitted the scientific interest of such
investigations. And if men of science have found it difficult to attain an
objective vision of women we cannot be surprised that medieval and still
more ancient conceptions have often been subtly mingled with the views of
philosophical and semi-philosophical writers.[47]

We may regard as a special variety of the ascetic view of sex,--for the
ascetics, as we see, freely but not quite legitimately, based their
asceticism largely on aesthetic considerations,--that insistence on the
proximity of the sexual to the excretory centres which found expression in
the early Church in Augustine's depreciatory assertion: "Inter faeces et
urinam nascimur," and still persists among many who by no means always
associate it with religious asceticism.[48] "As a result of what
ridiculous economy, and of what Mephistophilian irony," asks Tarde,[49]
"has Nature imagined that a function so lofty, so worthy of the poetic and
philosophical hymns which have celebrated it, only deserved to have its
exclusive organ shared with that of the vilest corporal functions?"

It may, however, be pointed out that this view of the matter, however
unconsciously, is itself the outcome of the ascetic depreciation of the
body. From a scientific point of view, the metabolic processes of the
body from one end to the other, whether regarded chemically or
psychologically, are all interwoven and all of equal dignity. We cannot
separate out any particular chemical or biological process and declare:
This is vile. Even what we call excrement still stores up the stuff of our
lives. Eating has to some persons seemed a disgusting process. But yet it
has been possible to say, with Thoreau, that "the gods have really
intended that men should feed divinely, as themselves, on their own nect