The element of
athletic asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found
even--indeed often in a high degree--among savages, has its main moral
justification as one aid to sublimation. Throughout life sublimation acts
by transforming some part at all events of the creative sexual energy from
its elementary animal manifestations into more highly individual and
social manifestations, or at all events into finer forms of sexual
activity, forms that seem to us more beautiful and satisfy us more widely.
Purity, we thus come to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation,
not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into forms of which our
best judgment may approve.

[7] We may gather the history of the term from the _Oxford Dictionary_.
Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by sublimation strange,"
and Ben Jonson in _Cynthia's Revels_ spoke of a being "sublimated and
refined"; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same seventeenth century,
referred to religion as "sublimating" human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a
little later, to "subliming" marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury,
early in the eighteenth century, spoke of human nature being "sublimated
by a sort of spiritual chemists" and Welton, a little later, of "a love
sublimate and refined," while, finally, and altogether in our modern
sense, Peacock in 1816 in his _Headlong Hall_ referred to "that
enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of greatness and energy."

We must not suppose--as is too often assumed--that sublimation can be
carried out easily, completely, or even with unmixed advantage. If it were
so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist would be confronted by few
difficulties, but we have ample reason to believe that it is not so. It is
with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who yet attaches great importance
to sublimation, as it is with heat in our machines: only a certain
proportion can be transformed into work. Or, as it is put by Loewenfeld,
who is not a constructive philosopher but a careful and cautious medical
investigator, the advantages of sublimation are not received in specially
high degree by those who permanently deny to their sexual impulse every
natural direct relief. The celibate Catholic clergy, notwithstanding their
heroic achievements in individual cases, can scarcely be said to display a
conspicuous excess of intellectual energy, on the whole, over the
non-celibate Protestant clergy; or, if we compare the English