e, and
even more so must he take to preventive restraint if he sees any motive
becoming unruly and urgent and troublesome. Fear is a sound reason for
abstinence and so is love. Many who have sensitive imaginations nowadays
very properly abstain from meat because of butchery. And it is often
needful, out of love and brotherhood, to abstain from things harmless to
oneself because they are inconveniently alluring to others linked to us.
The moderate drinker who sits at table sipping his wine in the sight of
one he knows to be a potential dipsomaniac is at best an unloving fool.

But mere abstinence and the doing of barren toilsome unrewarding things
for the sake of the toil, is a perversion of one's impulses. There is
neither honour nor virtue nor good in that.

I do not believe in negative virtues. I think the ideas of them arise
out of the system of metaphysical errors I have roughly analyzed in
my first Book, out of the inherent tendency of the mind to make
the relative absolute and to convert quantitative into qualitative
differences. Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such
unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay,
absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact
is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is
dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has
a tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts. It was
blindness to that which set men stoning the woman taken in adultery.
They forgot what they were made of. This stupidity, this unreasonable
idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and
exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born
impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang
from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but
introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions
and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions,
gather such constructive experience, as we may.

There is a mass of real superstition upon these points, a belief in a
magic purity, in magic personalities who can say:--

My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure,

and wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the young man in Mr. Kipling's
"Finest Story in the World."

There is a lurking disposition to believe, even among those who lead
the normal type of life, that the abstinent a