love to be either learnt or taught; it comes by nature. Nothing
could be further from the truth, most of all as regards civilized man.
Even the elementary fact of coitus needs to be taught. No one could take a
more austerely Puritanic view of sexual affairs than Sir James Paget, and
yet Paget (in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis") declared that
"Ignorance about sexual affairs seems to be a notable characteristic of
the more civilized part of the human race. Among ourselves it is certain
that the method of copulating needs to be taught, and that they to whom it
is not taught remain quite ignorant about it." Gallard, again, remarks
similarly (in his _Clinique des Maladies des Femmes_) that young people,
like Daphnis in Longus's pastoral, need a beautiful Lycenion to give them
a solid education, practical as well as theoretical, in these matters, and
he considers that mothers should instruct their daughters at marriage, and
fathers their sons. Philosophers have from time to time recognized the
gravity of these questions and have discoursed concerning them; thus
Epicurus, as Plutarch tells us,[375] would discuss with his disciples
various sexual matters, such as the proper time for coitus; but then, as
now, there were obscurantists who would leave even the central facts of
life to the hazards of chance or ignorance, and these presumed to blame
the philosopher.

There is, however, much more to be learnt in these matters than the mere
elementary facts of sexual intercourse. The art of love certainly includes
such primary facts of sexual hygiene, but it involves also the whole
erotic discipline of marriage, and that is why its significance is so
great, for the welfare and happiness of the individual, for the stability
of sexual unions, and indirectly for the race, since the art of love is
ultimately the art of attaining the right conditions for procreation.

"It seems extremely probable," wrote Professor E.D. Cope,[376] "that if
this subject could be properly understood, and become, in the details of
its practical conduct, a part of a written social science, the monogamic
marriage might attain a far more general success than is often found in
actual life." There can be no doubt whatever that this is the case. In the
great majority of marriages success depends exclusively upon the knowledge
of the art of love possessed by the two persons who enter into it. A
life-long monogamic union may, indeed, persist in the absence of