objects are especially dangerous. Thus we find that many
offenders against sexual morality show children obscene pictures, in
order to excite them sexually, and render them compliant. Such sexual
excitement is _per se_ bad for the child's health; but the moral dangers
are even more important. Children who have become familiar with such
obscene objects may perhaps suffer in consequence from an inadequate
development or even from a complete inhibition of the higher psychical
elements of the sexual life. The grave injury inflicted on children by
these pornographica cannot possibly be doubted. What has been said above
should, however, suffice to show that the nude in art has no necessary
connexion with this danger from pornographic objects; although
unfortunately, for business reasons, many persons hypocritically attempt
to justify by false reference to the interests of art, drawings of the
nude really intended to furnish erotic stimulus.

The much-discussed question of the common education of the sexes
(coeducation) is related to the mental hygiene of the sexual life of the
child. I shall deal with this question only in so far as it bears upon
our subject; and shall not consider whether other reasons, such as the
different endowments of the sexes, are decisively opposed to
coeducation. But coeducation has been opposed also for reasons of sexual
education, on two grounds: that it leads to a premature awakening of the
sexual life, and that it gives rise to immoral practices between the
children.

It is true that when boys and girls associate freely together the first
sexual feelings of boys are directed towards girls. But a separation of
boys and girls at school would here be of little use. Not only would
some other person of the female sex be apt to take the place of a girl
school-fellow, some person the boy often sees, it may be a grown woman,
it may be a child (a school-friend of the boy's sister or of the family,
a girl-cousin, or some girl employed about the house); but in many
cases, if the sexes are separated in youth, both in boys and in girls
the sexual impulse, when it awakens, may perhaps be directed towards a
member of the same sex. I may refer, in this connexion, to what was said
on page 60 about the undifferentiated sexual impulse.

A further problem is that of the sexual practices which may result from
the sexual impulse. It is an indisputable fact that many boys, when the
contrectation impulse is intermi