For instance:  it is very generally believed that the struggle for continence is greatly eased by continual and even exhausting physical activity.  To work hard—­to work even to exhaustion—­is believed by some to be a panacea.  At our great public schools the craze for athleticism is justified on the ground that, even at the expense of the things of the mind, it does at least keep the boys from moral evil.

I believe this to be a mistake, and a mistake which is due to our looking at sex from a too purely physical point of view.  It is, of course, imbecile to forget the physical, and deal with sex simply as a “sin”; but it is no less stupid to forget that our bodies and souls are intimately bound together, and that there is much more in passion than a merely physical instinct.  As a matter of fact, a tired person is not immune from sex-hunger, and even an exhausted person is likely to find that, far from sexual feeling being exhausted too, it turns out to be the only sensation that will respond to stimulus at all.  The exploitation of sexuality by our theatres and Press is not successful only in the case of the idle and the overfed; it finds its patrons also among those who are too tired to put their minds into anything really interesting from an intellectual or artistic point of view, but whose attention can be distracted and whose interest held by a more or less open appeal to the primitive instincts of sex.  Tired people want to be amused and interested if possible; but they are not easily amused by anything that appeals to the mind, because they are tired.  They want a sensation other than the customary one of fatigue, and the easiest sensation to excite is a sexual one.  They get it thinly disguised, in a theatre or music-hall, more thickly disguised in the form of cheap fiction, or quite undisguised elsewhere.  But the idea that sexuality is destroyed by fatigue is a very mischievous illusion which has misled and helped to destroy some of the most honest strivers after self-control.  Such people will, with a touching belief in saws, seek to find in exhaustion relief from temptation.  But it is not amusing always to feel tired.  One desires at last something else—­some other kind of feeling—­and one is too tired to make an effort.  But sexual sensation is easily excited, and in the end the unfortunate finds that he has yielded again.  His hard fight has only ended in defeat, and he either abandons the advice as mistaken, or himself as hopelessly and uniquely depraved.

The truth is, of course, that what is needed is not physical exhaustion any more than physical idleness and overfeeding.  What is wanted is hard and interesting work—­work that absorbs one’s mental as well as physical strength.  A boy at a public school who really cares for games can pour his energies into them and appear a fine example of the system; a boy who, though games are compulsory, cannot interest himself in them at all, is not helped by being physically