age of sex," Rosa Mayreder says, "by acceptance, not by
denials, and men can only do this with the help of women." The would-be
chastity of cold calculation is equally unbeautiful and unreal, and
without any sort of value. A true and worthy chastity can only be
supported by an ardent ideal, whether, as among the early Christians, this
is the erotic ideal of a new romance, or, as among ourselves, a more
humanly erotic ideal. "Only erotic idealism," says Ellen Key, "can arouse
enthusiasm for chastity." Chastity in a healthily developed person can
thus be beautifully exercised only in the actual erotic life; in part it
is the natural instinct of dignity and temperance; in part it is the art
of touching the things of sex with hands that remember their aptness for
all the fine ends of life. Upon the doorway of entrance to the inmost
sanctuary of love there is thus the same inscription as on the doorway to
the Epidaurian Sanctuary of Aesculapius: "None but the pure shall enter
here."

It will be seen that the definition of chastity remains somewhat
lacking in precision. That is inevitable. We cannot grasp purity
tightly, for, like snow, it will merely melt in our hands.
"Purity itself forbids too minute a system of rules for the
observance of purity," well says Sidgwick (_Methods of Ethics_,
Bk. iii, Ch. IX). Elsewhere (op. cit., Bk. iii, Ch. XI) he
attempts to answer the question: What sexual relations are
essentially impure? and concludes that no answer is possible.
"There appears to be no distinct principle, having any claim to
self-evidence, upon which the question can be answered so as to
command general assent." Even what is called "Free Love," he
adds, "in so far as it is earnestly advocated as a means to a
completer harmony of sentiment between men and women, cannot be
condemned as impure, for it seems paradoxical to distinguish
purity from impurity merely by less rapidity of transition."

Moll, from the standpoint of medical psychology, reaches the same
conclusion as Sidgwick from that of ethics. In a report on the
"Value of Chastity for Men," published as an appendix to the
third edition (1899) of his _Kontraere Sexualempfindung_, the
distinguished Berlin physician discusses the matter with much
vigorous common sense, insisting that "chaste and unchaste are
_relative ideas_." We must not, he states, as is so often done,
ide