ted; and some writers suggest that
in teaching children and young persons a proper respect for the genital
organs, such teaching should be based upon a knowledge of the subsequent
function of these organs in the work of reproduction. The individual
processes cannot at once be referred to one field or the other;
involuntary sexual orgasm, menstruation, the puberal development,
inasmuch as they exhibit both a subjective and an objective aspect,
belong to both fields. This is also true of the sexual act itself, in
connexion with which, moreover, the principal difficulties of sexual
enlightenment arise.

Having thus considered the general significance of sexual enlightenment,
we have next to ask what are the grounds on which such enlightenment is
thought to be desirable. These will have become partly apparent from
what has been said regarding the importance of the sexual life of the
child; but this does not exhaust the matter, for the sexual
enlightenment of the child may also comprise instruction concerning the
entire subsequent development of the sexual life. The reasons for sexual
enlightenment may be classified under various heads; the chief of these
are reasons of health, of social life, of law, morality, education, and
the intellectual development.

To consider first the matter of intellectual development, we have here
to think, not so much of a limitation of the intellectual growth in
consequence of the sexual thoughts of the child, as of the fact that
instruction in the nature of sexual processes, at least as far as the
objective field is concerned, promotes the general culture. The degree
to which even adults are ignorant about such matters, is hardly
credible. There are persons who believe that every egg laid by a hen
will develop into a chicken if incubated by the mother, or if kept for
the proper time in an artificial incubator; there are persons who do
not know what the hard roe and soft roe of fishes are, who do not
understand the nature of the spawning process, and are, in fact, quite
uninstructed concerning the process of reproduction in fishes. I have
conversed with adults who did not know wherein a wether differs from a
ram, or a bullock from a bull; and who were even ignorant, as regards
great groups of the animal kingdom, whether they reproduced their kind
by means of eggs or living young. But on such matters as these, every
cultured person should be sufficiently informed, and should not be
capable of