any longer. A nation which tries to lift its sexual
morality by dragging the sexual problems to the street for the
inspection of the crowd, without shyness and without shame, and which
wilfully makes them objects of gossip and stage entertainment, is
doing worse than Munchausen when he tried to lift himself by his
scalp. It seems less important that the youth learn the secrets of
sexual intercourse than that their teachers and guardians learn the
elements of physiological psychology; the sexual sins of the youth
start from the educational sins of the elders.

It is easy to say, as the social reformers and the vice commissioners
and the sex instructors and many others have repeated in ever new
forms, that "all children's questions should be answered truthfully,"
and to work up the whole sermon to the final trumpet call, "The truth
shall make you free." Yet this is entirely useless as long as we have
not defined what we mean by freedom, and above all what we mean by
truth. If the child enjoys the beautiful softness of the butterfly's
coloured wing, it is surely a truth, if we teach him that seen under
the microscope in reality there is no softness there, but large ugly
bumps and hollows and that the beautiful impression is nothing but an
illusion. But is this truth of the microscope the only truth, and is
science the only truth, and is there ever only one truth about the
concrete facts of reality? Does truth in this sense not simply mean a
certain order into which we bring our experience in the service of
certain purposes of thought? We may approach the chaos of life
experience with different purposes, and led by any one of them we may
reach that consistent unity of ideas for the limited outlook which we
call truth. The chemist has a right to consider everything in the
world as chemical substances, and the mathematician may take the same
things as geometric objects. And yet he who seeks a meaning in these
things and a value and an inner development may come to another kind
of truth. Only a general philosophy of life can ultimately grade and
organize those various relative truths and combine them in an
all-embracing unity.

No doubt the physician's scientific discoveries and observations are
perfectly true. Man is an animal, and anatomical and physiological
conditions control his existence, and if we want to understand this
animal's life and want to keep it healthy, we have to ask for the
truth of the physician. But sha