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of women are altogether unable to give themselves up to the sexual act
in such a way as to derive from it real enjoyment and satisfaction. A
part of the severe disillusionment following marriage, depends upon the
lack of normal sexual sensibility in the wife; and it is by no means
improbable that this state depends in some cases upon the education
received in girlhood. If it is impressed on anyone from childhood
upwards that a particular act is disgusting and shameful, ultimately
inhibitions may arise, owing to which the natural impulse to the
performance of that act, and its natural course and natural enjoyment,
may be prevented. And although the widely prevalent lack of sexual
sensibility in women has additional causes, nevertheless I regard it as
probable that in some of the cases, at any rate, this insensibility
directly results from educational influences. In this matter, too, we
must guard against exaggeration. We must educate children, boys as well
as girls, in the belief that to mishandle the genital organs is
forbidden alike by divine and by human law. But we must not teach them
to regard the sexual act as in itself disgusting; more especially in
view of the fact that such an idea conflicts with the lofty ethical
significance of the act to which we all owe our existence.

What has been said about nakedness, has bearings also upon the
relationships of the education of children to the matter of the nude in
art. No intelligent person will deny the importance to art of the
representation of the nude. A clothed Venus is a thing with which the
connoisseur would prefer to dispense. Although I am not myself an
enthusiastic adherent of the movement started a few years back with a
great flourish of trumpets for the introduction of art into the
education of children--a movement which has already perceptibly
slackened--I do not wish to deny the important bearings of art upon the
education of the child. Children who are still comparatively young, have
not as a rule much understanding of art. None the less, we must not
withhold from the child possibilities of appreciating the beauties of
the nude. Apart from this purely educational aim, we have to remember
that it is impossible to preserve children completely from the sight of
the nude in art. We might, of course, exclude them from our museums; but
our own houses also often contain nude statuary, and books with
illustrations of the nude figure; and nude statues are to b