ind; and J.S. Mill, it is said, was sexually of
little more than infantile development.

Up to this point I have been considering the quality of chastity and the
quality of asceticism in their most general sense and without any attempt
at precise differentiation.[91] But if we are to accept these as modern
virtues, valid to-day, it is necessary that we should be somewhat more
precise in defining them. It seems most convenient, and most strictly
accordant also with etymology, if we agree to mean by asceticism or
_ascesis_, the athlete quality of self-discipline, controlling, by no
means necessarily for indefinitely prolonged periods, the gratification of
the sexual impulse. By chastity, which is primarily the quality of purity,
and secondarily that of holiness, rather than of abstinence, we may best
understand a due proportion between erotic claims and the other claims of
life. "Chastity," as Ellen Key well says, "is harmony between body and
soul in relation to love." Thus comprehended, asceticism is the virtue of
control that leads up to erotic gratification, and chastity is the virtue
which exerts its harmonizing influence in the erotic life itself.

It will be seen that asceticism by no means necessarily involves perpetual
continence. Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training,
which has reference to an end not itself. If it is compulsorily perpetual,
whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is
no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint
of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life.
If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside
itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot be
subserved by a person who is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his own
natural instincts. A man may, indeed, as a matter of taste or preference,
live his whole life in sexual abstinence, freely and easily, but in that
case he is not an ascetic, and his abstinence is neither a subject for
applause nor for criticism.

In the same way chastity, far from involving sexual abstinence, only has
its value when it is brought within the erotic sphere. A purity that is
ignorance, when the age of childish innocence is once passed, is mere
stupidity; it is nearer to vice than to virtue. Nor is purity consonant
with effort and struggle; in that respect it differs from asceticism. "We
conquer the bond