ignorant of modern science, the ancients had on many matters affecting
man, more rational views than the moderns; above all, they gave
practical application to the views founded on experience. We praise with
enthusiastic admiration the beauty and strength of the men and women of
Greece; but the fact is overlooked that, not the happy climate, nor the
bewitching nature of a territory that stretched along the bay-indented
sea, but the physical culture and maxims of education, consistently
enforced by the State, thus affected both the being and the development
of the population. These measures were calculated to combine beauty,
strength and suppleness of body with wit and elasticity of mind, both of
which were transmitted to the descendants. True enough, even then, in
comparison with man, woman was neglected in point of mental, but not of
corporal culture.[86] In Sparta, that went furthest in the corporal
culture of the two sexes, boys and girls went naked until the age of
puberty, and participated in common in the exercises of the body, in
games and in wrestling. The naked exposure of the human body, together
with the natural treatment of natural things, had the advantage that
sensuous excitement--to-day artificially cultivated by the separation of
the sexes from early childhood--was then prevented. The corporal make-up
of one sex, together with its distinctive organs, was no secret to the
other. There, no play of equivocal words could arise. Nature was Nature.
The one sex rejoiced at the beauty of the other. Mankind will have to
return to Nature and to the natural intercourse of the sexes; it must
cast off the now-ruling and unhealthy spiritual notions concerning man;
it must do that by setting up methods of education that fit in with our
own state of culture, and that may bring on the physical and mental
regeneration of the race.

Among us, and especially on the subject of female education, seriously
erroneous conceptions are still prevalent. That woman also should have
strength, courage and resolution, is considered heretical, "unwomanly,"
although none would dare deny that, equipped with such qualities, woman
could protect herself against many ills and inconveniences. Conversely,
woman is cramped in her physical, exactly as in her intellectual
development. The irrationalness of her dress plays an important _role_
herein. It not only, unconscionably hampers her in her physique, it
directly ruins her;--and yet, but few p