ice discrimination; the frank passions of youth are met with a grimace
of horror on all sides, with _rumores senum severiorum_, with an
insistence on reticence and hypocrisy. Such suppression is favourable to
corruption: the fancy with a sort of idiotic ingenuity comes to supply
the place of experience; and nature is rendered vicious and overlaid
with pruriency, artifice, and the love of novelty. Hereupon the
authorities that rule in such matters naturally redouble their vigilance
and exaggerate their reasonable censure: chastity begins to seem
essentially holy and perpetual virginity ends by becoming an absolute
ideal. Thus the disorder in man's life and disposition, when grown
intolerable, leads him to condemn the very elements out of which order
might have been constituted, and to mistake his total confusion for his
total depravity.

[Sidenote: The heart alienated from the world.]

Banished from the open day, covered with mockery, and publicly ignored,
this necessary pleasure flourishes none the less in dark places and in
the secret soul. Its familiar presence there, its intimate habitation in
what is most oneself, helps to cut the world in two and to separate the
inner from the outer life. In that mysticism which cannot disguise its
erotic affinities this disruption reaches an absolute and theoretic
form; but in many a youth little suspected of mysticism it produces
estrangement from the conventional moralising world, which he
instinctively regards as artificial and alien. It prepares him for
excursions into a private fairy-land in which unthought-of joys will
blossom amid friendlier magic forces. The truly good then seems to be
the fantastic, the sensuous, the prodigally unreal. He gladly forgets
the dreary world he lives in to listen for a thousand and one nights to
his dreams.

[Sidenote: Childish ideals.]

This is the region where those who have no conception of the Life of
Reason place the ideal; and an ideal is indeed there but the ideal of a
single and inordinate impulse. A rational mind, on the contrary, moves
by preference in the real world, cultivating all human interests in due
proportion. The love-sick and luxurious dream-land dear to irrational
poets is a distorted image of the ideal world; but this distortion has
still an ideal motive, since it is made to satisfy the cravings of a
forgotten part of the soul and to make a home for those elements in
human nature which have been denied overt existence