more or less degree, but never
entirely, into forms that further the development of the individual and
the general ends of life. These transformations are to some extent
automatic, to some extent within the control of personal guidance. But
there are limits to such guidance, for the primitive human personality can
never be altogether rendered an artificial creature of civilisation. When
these limits are reached the transmutation of sexual energy may become
useless or even dangerous, and we fail to attain the exquisite flower of
Purity.

III

It may seem that in setting forth the nature of the sexual impulse in the
light of modern biology and psychology, I have said but little of purity
and less of morality. Yet that is as it should be. We must first be
content to see how the machine works and watch the wheels go round. We
must understand before we can pretend to control; in the natural world, as
Bacon long ago said, we can only command by obeying. Moreover, in this
field Nature's order is far older and more firmly established than our
civilised human morality. In our arrogance we often assume that Morality
is the master of Nature. Yet except when it is so elementary or
fundamental as to be part of Nature, it is but a guide, and a guide that
is only a child, so young, so capricious, that in every age its wayward
hand has sought to pull Nature in a different direction. Even only in
order to guide we must first see and know.

We realise that never more than when we observe the distinction which
conventional sex-morals so often makes between men and women. Failing to
find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in
themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all. So man
has regarded himself as the sexual animal, and woman as either the passive
object of his adoring love or the helpless victim of his degrading lust,
in either case as a being who, unlike man, possessed an innocent "purity"
by nature, without any need for the trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a
real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality
has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man,
an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when
we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue
in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty
jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual impulse; women