they have been untainted by civilization, virility is usually maintained
by a fine asceticism; the endurance of hardship, self-control and
restraint, tempered by rare orgies, constitute a discipline which covers
the sexual as well as every other department of savage life. To preserve
the same virility in civilized life, it may well be felt, we must
deliberately cultivate a virtue which under savage conditions of life is
natural.[87]

The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of
the virtue of chastity in its modern sense. The command: "Be hard," as
Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling
indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous attitude
towards one's self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up
and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately
accepted ends. "A relative chastity," he wrote, "a fundamental and wise
foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine
reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[88]
In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern
movement for the restoration of chastity to its proper place as a real and
beneficial virtue, and not a mere empty convention. Such a movement could
not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious
softness in sexual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as
to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction. For erotic satisfaction, in
its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the sexual
impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls "irradiation," that is to
say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism. And that
can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and
direct gratification of sexual desire, by compelling it to increase its
force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that
the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a
petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole
soul as well as the whole body has its part. "Only the chaste can be
really obscene," said Huysmans. And on a higher plane, only the chaste can
really love.

"Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschaetzung der
Physischen Reinheit," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. ii,
Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength