ations--that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman to
readjust herself to the new conditions of life is leading today, is
not towards a greater sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increased
self-indulgence, but toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness of
all sex relations, and a clearer perception of the sex relation between
man and woman as the basis of human society, on whose integrity, beauty
and healthfulness depend the health and beauty of human life, as a
whole. Above all, that it will lead to a closer, more permanent, more
emotionally and intellectually complete and intimate relation between
the individual man and woman. And if in the present disco-ordinate
transitional stage of our social growth it is found necessary to
allow of readjustment by means of divorce, it will not be because
such readjustments will be regarded lightly, but rather, as when, in a
complex and delicate mechanism moved by a central spring, we allow
in the structure for the readjustment and regulation of that spring,
because on its absolute perfection of action depends the movement of the
whole mechanism. In the last pages of the book, I tried to express what
seems to me a most profound truth often overlooked--that as humanity
and human societies pass on slowly from their present barbarous and
semi-savage condition in matters of sex into a higher, it will be found
increasingly, that over and above its function in producing and sending
onward the physical stream of life (a function which humanity shares
with the most lowly animal and vegetable forms of life, and which even
by some noted thinkers of the present day seems to be regarded as its
only possible function,) that sex and the sexual relation between man
and woman have distinct aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual functions
and ends, apart entirely from physical reproduction. That noble as is
the function of the physical reproduction of humanity by the union of
man and woman, rightly viewed, that union has in it latent, other, and
even higher forms, of creative energy and life-dispensing power, and
that its history on earth has only begun. As the first wild rose when it
hung from its stem with its centre of stamens and pistils and its single
whorl of pale petals, had only begun its course, and was destined, as
the ages passed, to develop stamen upon stamen and petal upon petal,
till it assumed a hundred forms of joy and beauty.

And, it would indeed almost seem, that