noticed that a girl with a voluptuous though coarse figure and a plain face will attract much more masculine attention than a girl whose figure and face are artistically beautiful without being voluptuous.  But this only helps to prove my main thesis—­that the sense of personal beauty is one of the latest products of civilization, rare even at the present day.  What I deny most emphatically is that the theory advocated by Bain, Eckstein, and Mantegazza applies to those persons who are so lucky as to have a sense of beauty.  These fortunate individuals can admire the charms of a living beauty without any more concupiscence or thought of an endearing embrace than accompanies their contemplation of the Venus de Milo or a Madonna painted by Murillo; and if they are in love with a particular girl their admiration of her beauty is superlatively free from carnal ingredients, as we saw in the section on Mental Purity.  Since in such a question personal evidence is of importance, I will add that, fortunately, I have been deeply in love several times in my life and can therefore testify that each time my admiration of the girl’s beauty was as purely esthetic as if she had been a flower.  In each case the mischief was begun by a pair of brown eyes.

Eyes, it is true, can be as wanton and as voluptuous as a plump figure.  Powers notes (20) that some California Indian girls are pretty and have “large, voluptuous eyes.”  Such eyes are common among the lower races and Orientals; but they are not the eyes which inspire romantic love.  Lips, too, it might be said, invite kisses; but a lover would consider it sacrilege to touch his idol’s lips unchastely.  Savages are strangers to kissing for the exactly opposite reason—­that it is too refined a detail of sensuality to appeal to their coarse nerves.  How far they are from being able to appreciate lips esthetically appears from the way in which they so often deform them.  The mouth is peculiarly the index of mental and moral refinement, and a refined pair of lips can inspire as pure a love as the celestial beauty of innocent eyes.  As for the other features, what is there to suggest lascivious thoughts in a clear complexion, an oval chin, ivory teeth, rosy cheeks, or in curved eyebrows, long, dark lashes, or flowing tresses?  Our admiration of these, and of a graceful gait, is as pure and esthetic—­as purely esthetic—­as our admiration of a sunset, a flower, a humming-bird, a lovely child.  It has been truly said that a girl’s marriage chances have been made or marred by the size or shape of her nose.  What has the size or shape of a girl’s nose to do with the “endearing embrace?” This question alone reduces the concupiscence theory ad absurdum.

UTILITY IS NOT BEAUTY

Almost as repulsive as the view which identifies the sense of personal beauty with concupiscence is that which would reduce it to a matter of coarse utility.  Thus Eckstein, misled by Schopenhauer, holds that healthy teeth are beautiful for the reason that they guarantee the proper mastication of the food; while small breasts are ugly because they do not promise sufficient nourishment to the child that is to be born.