had only had three weeks’ happiness,” said a woman, “I would not quarrel with Fate, but to have one’s whole life so absolutely empty is horrible.”  If such vacuous self-restraint may, by courtesy, be termed a virtue, it is but a negative virtue.  The persons who achieve it, as the result of congenitally feeble sexual aptitudes, merely (as Gyurkovechky, Fuerbringer, and Loewenfeld have all alike remarked) made a virtue of their weakness.  Many others, whose instincts were less weak, when they disdainfully put to flight the desires of sex in early life, have found that in later life that foe returns in tenfold force and perhaps in unnatural shapes.[104]

The conception of “sexual abstinence” is, we see, an entirely false and artificial conception.  It is not only ill-adjusted to the hygienic facts of the case but it fails even to invoke any genuinely moral motive, for it is exclusively self-regarding and self-centred.  It only becomes genuinely moral, and truly inspiring, when we transform it into the altruistic virtue of self-sacrifice.  When we have done so we see that the element of abstinence in it ceases to be essential, “Self-sacrifice,” writes the author of a thoughtful book on the sexual life, “is acknowledged to be the basis of virtue; the noblest instances of self-sacrifice are those dictated by sexual affection.  Sympathy is the secret of altruism; nowhere is sympathy more real and complete than in love.  Courage, both moral and physical, the love of truth and honor, the spirit of enterprise, and the admiration of moral worth, are all inspired by love as by nothing else in human nature.  Celibacy denies itself that inspiration or restricts its influence, according to the measure of its denial of sexual intimacy.  Thus the deliberate adoption of a consistently celibate life implies the narrowing down of emotional and moral experience to a degree which is, from the broad scientific standpoint, unjustified by any of the advantages piously supposed to accrue from it."[105]

In a sane natural order all the impulses are centred in the fulfilment of needs and not in their denial.  Moreover, in this special matter of sex, it is inevitable that the needs of others, and not merely the needs of the individual himself, should determine action.  It is more especially the needs of the female which are the determining factor; for those needs are more various, complex and elusive, and in his attentiveness to their gratification the male finds a source of endless erotic satisfaction.  It might be thought that the introduction of an altruistic motive here is merely the claim of theoretical morality insisting that there shall be a firm curb on animal instinct.  But, as we have again and again seen throughout the long course of these Studies, it is not so.  The animal instinct itself makes this demand.  It is a biological law that rules throughout the zooelogical world and has involved the universality of courtship.  In man it is only modified because in man sexual needs are not entirely concentrated in reproduction, but more or less penetrate the whole of life.