If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure--our social feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art--are, in some degree at least, also built up on the impulse of sex, and would have been, if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on love. To look upon love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to fall into the trap of a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to refuse to accept the fact of love.
It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The passions are the heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote Helvétius long since in _De l'Esprit_. "The activity of the mind depends on the activity of the passions, and it is at the period of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues (_Psychological Review_, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex," Professor Woods Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution," _Monist_, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his _Physiology of Mind_, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one _is_ more complete," says Nietzsche (_Der Wille zur Macht_, p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the greatest stimulant of life...It is not merely that it changes the feeling of values: the lover _is_ worth more, is stronger. In animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors, and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive music. It is not otherwise in man...Even in art the door is opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left over in poetry and music? _L'Art pour l'art_ perhaps, the quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All the rest is created by love."
It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that sexual love (including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to inquire.
It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when discussing the erratic and imperfect distribution of the conception of love, and even of words for love, over the world, by no means all people are equally apt for experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the emotions of sexual exaltation. The difference between the knight and the churl still subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the refinements of sexual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to insist, quite commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have little effect on the intellectual and emotional nature.[68] But this is not the case with the people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in his remarkable drama _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_, his conviction that, even from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde, the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life. "But will it always be thus? Are there not reasons for thinking that the future perhaps reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular order?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his own _Mécanique Celeste_, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real, found (as indeed it may be said the great English Positivist Mill also found) the culmination of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love. One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of affection I have never ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be worthily filled--even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain." And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote: "Why can no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say, is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The greatest and most brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote _The Imitation of Christ_ or _The Letters of a Portuguese Nun_. And how many others!
FOOTNOTES: [45] _Meditationes Piissimæ de Cognitione Humanæ Conditionis_, Migne's _Patrologia_, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap. III, "De Dignitate Animæ et Vilitate Corporis." It may be worth while to quote more at length the vigorous language of the original. "Si diligenter consideres quid per os et nares cæterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum numquam vidisti...Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum, et quid es ab ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam. Profecto fuit quand non eras: postea de vili materia factus, et vilissimo panno involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica tua fuit pellis secundina. Nihil aliud est homo quam sperma fetidum, saccus stercorum, cibus vermium...Quid superbis, pulvis et cinis, cujus conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere poena, mori angustia?"
[46] See (in Mignes' edition) _S. Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis Collationes_, lib. ii, cap. IX.
[47] Dühren (_Neue Forshungen über die Marquis de Sade_, pp. 432 et seq.) shows how the ascetic view of woman's body persisted, for instance, in Schopenhauer and De Sade.
[48] In "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of these _Studies_, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the study of "Erotic Symbolism," the mutual reactions of the sexual and excretory centres were fully dealt with.
[50] The above passage, now slightly modified, originally formed an unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in _The New Spirit_, first issued in 1889.
[51] Even in the ninth century, however, when the monastic movement was rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the tendencies of the new ascetics. Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of Corbie, wrote a treatise (_Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus est_) to prove that Mary really gave birth to Jesus through her sexual organs, and not, as some high-strung persons were beginning to think could alone be possible, through the more conventionally decent breasts. The sexual organs were sanctified. "Spiritus sanctus...et thalamum tanto dignum sponso sanctificavit et portam" (Achery, _Spicilegium_, vol. i, p. 55).
[52] _Pædagogus_, lib. ii, cap. X. Elsewhere (id., lib. ii, Ch. VI) he makes a more detailed statement to the same effect.
[53] See, e.g., Wilhelm Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et seq.
[54] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xxii, cap. XXIV. "There is no need," he says again (id., lib. xiv, cap. V) "that in our sins and vices we accuse the nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind and degree the flesh is good."
[55] St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv, cap. XXIII-XXVI. Chrysostom and Gregory, of Nyssa, thought that in Paradise human beings would have multiplied by special creation, but such is not the accepted Catholic doctrine.
[56] W. Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et seq. Without the body, Tertullian declared, there could be no virginity and no salvation. The soul itself is corporeal. He carries, indeed, his idea of the omnipresence of the body to the absurd.
[57] Rufinus, _Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum_, cap. XII.
[58] Migne, _Patrologia Græca_, vol. xxvi, pp. 1170 et seq.
[59] Even in physical conformation the human sexual organs, when compared with those of the lower animals, show marked differences (see "The Mechanism of Detumescence," in the fifth volume of these _Studies_).
[60] It may perhaps be as well to point out, with Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 208), that the word "bestial" is generally used quite incorrectly in this connection. Indeed, not only for the higher, but also for the lower manifestation of the sexual impulse, it would usually be more correct to use instead the qualification "human."
[62] It has, however, become colored and suspect from an early period in the history of Christianity. St. Augustine (_De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv, cap. XV), while admitting that libido or lust is merely the generic name for all desire, adds that, as specially applied to the sexual appetite, it is justly and properly mixed up with ideas of shame.
[63] Hinton well illustrates this feeling. "We call by the name of lust," he declares in his MSS., "the most simple and natural desires. We might as well term hunger and thirst 'lust' as so call sex-passion, when expressing simply Nature's prompting. We miscall it 'lust,' cruelly libelling those to whom we ascribe it, and introduce absolute disorder. For, by foolishly confounding Nature's demands with lust, we insist upon restraint upon her."
[64] Several centuries earlier another French writer, the distinguished physician, A. Laurentius (Des Laurens) in his _Historia Anatomica Humani Corporis_ (lib. viii, Quæstio vii) had likewise puzzled over "the incredible desire of coitus," and asked how it was that "that divine animal, full of reason and judgment, which we call Man, should be attracted to those obscene parts of women, soiled with filth, which are placed, like a sewer, in the lowest part of the body." It is noteworthy that, from the first, and equally among men of religion, men of science, and men of letters, the mystery of this problem has peculiarly appealed to the French mind.
[65] Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, vol. ii, pp. 608 et seq.
[66] "Perhaps there is scarcely a man," wrote Malthus, a clergyman as well as one of the profoundest thinkers of his day (_Essay on the Principle of Population_, 1798, Ch. XI), "who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again. The superiority of intellectual to sexual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiate, than in their being more real and essential."
[67] The whole argument of the fourth volume of these _Studies_, on "Sexual Selection in Man," points in this direction.
[68] "Perhaps most average men," Forel remarks (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 307), "are but slightly receptive to the intoxication of love; they are at most on the level of the _gourmet_, which is by no means necessarily an immoral plane, but is certainly not that of poetry."
CHAPTER V.
THE FUNCTION OF CHASTITY.
Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love--The Eighteenth Century Revolt Against the Ideal of Chastity--Unnatural Forms of Chastity--The Psychological Basis of Asceticism--Asceticism and Chastity as Savage Virtues--The Significance of Tahiti--Chastity Among Barbarous Peoples--Chastity Among the Early Christians--Struggles of the Saints with the Flesh--The Romance of Christian Chastity--Its Decay in Mediæval Times--_Aucassin et Nicolette_ and the new Romance of Chaste Love--The Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians--The Penitentials--Influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation--The Revolt Against Virginity as a Virtue--The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue--The Influences That Favor the Virtue of Chastity--Chastity as a Discipline--The Value of Chastity for the Artist--Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation--The Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.
The supreme importance of chastity, and even of asceticism, has never at any time, or in any greatly vital human society, altogether failed of recognition. Sometimes chastity has been exalted in human estimation, sometimes it has been debased; it has frequently changed the nature of its manifestations; but it has always been there. It is even a part of the beautiful vision of all Nature. "The glory of the world is seen only by a chaste mind," said Thoreau with his fine extravagance. "To whomsoever this fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in Nature." Without chastity it is impossible to maintain the dignity of sexual love. The society in which its estimation sinks to a minimum is in the last stages of degeneration. Chastity has for sexual love an importance which it can never lose, least of all to-day.
It is quite true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many men of high moral and intellectual distinction pronounced very decidedly their condemnation of the ideal of chastity. The great Buffon refused to recognize chastity as an ideal and referred scornfully to "that kind of insanity which has turned a girl's virginity into a thing with a real existence," while William Morris, in his downright manner, once declared at a meeting of the Fellowship of the New Life, that asceticism is "the most disgusting vice that afflicted human nature." Blake, though he seems always to have been a strictly moral man in the most conventional sense, felt nothing but contempt for chastity, and sometimes confers a kind of religious solemnity on the idea of unchastity. Shelley, who may have been unwise in sexual matters but can scarcely be called unchaste, also often seems to associate religion and morality, not with chastity, but with unchastity, and much the same may be said of James Hinton.[69] But all these men--with other men of high character who have pronounced similar opinions--were reacting against false, decayed, and conventional forms of chastity. They were not rebelling against an ideal; they were seeking to set up an ideal in a place where they realized that a mischievous pretense was masquerading as a moral reality.
We cannot accept an ideal of chastity unless we ruthlessly cast aside all the unnatural and empty forms of chastity. If chastity is merely a fatiguing effort to emulate in the sexual sphere the exploits of professional fasting men, an effort using up all the energies of the organism and resulting in no achievement greater than the abstinence it involves, then it is surely an unworthy ideal. If it is a feeble submission to an external conventional law which there is no courage to break, then it is not an ideal at all. If it is a rule of morality imposed by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of revolt. If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality based on misconception. And if it is merely an external acceptance of conventions without any further acceptance, even in act, then it is a contemptible farce. These are the forms of chastity which during the past two centuries many fine-souled men have vigorously rejected.
The fact that chastity, or asceticism, is a real virtue, with fine uses, becomes evident when we realize that it has flourished at all times, in connection with all kinds of religions and the most various moral codes. We find it pronounced among savages, and the special virtues of savagery--hardness, endurance, and bravery--are intimately connected with the cultivation of chastity and asceticism.[70] It is true that savages seldom have any ideal of chastity in the degraded modern sense, as a state of permanent abstinence from sexual relationships having a merit of its own apart from any use. They esteem chastity for its values, magical or real, as a method of self-control which contributes towards the attainment of important ends. The ability to bear pain and restraint is nearly always a main element in the initiation of youths at puberty. The custom of refraining from sexual intercourse before expeditions of war and hunting, and other serious concerns involving great muscular and mental strain, whatever the motives assigned, is a sagacious method of economizing energy. The extremely widespread habit of avoiding intercourse during pregnancy and suckling, again, is an admirable precaution in sexual hygiene which it is extremely difficult to obtain the observance of in civilization. Savages, also, are perfectly well aware how valuable sexual continence is, in combination with fasting and solitude, to acquire the aptitude for abnormal spiritual powers.
Thus C. Hill Tout (_Journal Anthropological Institute_, Jan.-June, 1905, pp. 143-145) gives an interesting account of the self-discipline undergone by those among the Salish Indians of British Columbia, who seek to acquire shamanistic powers. The psychic effects of such training on these men, says Hill Tout, is undoubted. "It enables them to undertake and accomplish feats of abnormal strength, agility, and endurance; and gives them at times, besides a general exaltation of the senses, undoubted clairvoyant and other supernormal mental and bodily powers." At the other end of the world, as shown by the _Reports of the Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_ (vol. v, p. 321), closely analogous methods of obtaining supernatural powers are also customary.
There are fundamental psychological reasons for the wide prevalence of asceticism and for the remarkable manner in which it involves self-mortification, even acute physical suffering. Such pain is an actual psychic stimulant, more especially in slightly neurotic persons. This is well illustrated by a young woman, a patient of Janet's, who suffered from mental depression and was accustomed to find relief by slightly burning her hands and feet. She herself clearly understood the nature of her actions. "I feel," she said, "that I make an effort when I hold my hands on the stove, or when I pour boiling water on my feet; it is a violent act and it awakens me: I feel that it is really done by myself and not by another...To make a mental effort by itself is too difficult for me; I have to supplement it by physical efforts. I have not succeeded in any other way; that is all: when I brace myself up to burn myself I make my mind freer, lighter and more active for several days. Why do you speak of my desire for mortification? My parents believe that, but it is absurd. It would be a mortification if it brought any suffering, but I enjoy this suffering, it gives me back my mind; it prevents my thoughts from stopping: what would one not do to attain such happiness?" (P. Janet, "The Pathogenesis of Some Impulsions," _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, April, 1906.) If we understand this psychological process we may realize how it is that even in the higher religions, however else they may differ, the practical value of asceticism and mortification as the necessary door to the most exalted religious state is almost universally recognized, and with complete cheerfulness. "Asceticism and ecstacy are inseparable," as Probst-Biraben remarks at the outset of an interesting paper on Mahommedan mysticism ("L'Extase dans le Mysticisme Musulman," _Revue Philosophique_, Nov., 1906). Asceticism is the necessary ante-chamber to spiritual perfection.
It thus happens that savage peoples largely base their often admirable enforcement of asceticism not on the practical grounds that would justify it, but on religious grounds that with the growth of intelligence fall into discredit.[71] Even, however, when the scrupulous observances of savages, whether in sexual or in non-sexual matters, are without any obviously sound basis it cannot be said that they are entirely useless if they tend to encourage self-control and the sense of reverence.[72] The would-be intelligent and practical peoples who cast aside primitive observances because they seem baseless or even ridiculous, need a still finer practical sense and still greater intelligence in order to realize that, though the reasons for the observances have been wrong, yet the observances themselves may have been necessary methods of attaining personal and social efficiency. It constantly happens in the course of civilization that we have to revive old observances and furnish them with new reasons.
In considering the moral quality of chastity among savages, we must carefully separate that chastity which among semi-primitive peoples is exclusively imposed upon women. This has no moral quality whatever, for it is not exercised as a useful discipline, but merely enforced in order to heighten the economic and erotic value of the women. Many authorities believe that the regard for women as property furnishes the true reason for the widespread insistence on virginity in brides. Thus A.B. Ellis, speaking of the West Coast of Africa (_Yoruba-Speaking Peoples_, pp. 183 _et seq._), says that girls of good class are betrothed as mere children, and are carefully guarded from men, while girls of lower class are seldom betrothed, and may lead any life they choose. "In this custom of infant or child betrothals we probably find the key to that curious regard for ante-nuptial chastity found not only among the tribes of the Gold and Slave Coasts, but also among many other uncivilized peoples in different parts of the world." In a very different part of the world, in Northern Siberia, "the Yakuts," Sieroshevski states (_Journal Anthropological Institute_, Jan.-June, 1901, p. 96), "see nothing immoral in illicit love, providing only that nobody suffers material loss by it. It is true that parents will scold a daughter if her conduct threatens to deprive them of their gain from the bride-price; but if once they have lost hope of marrying her off, or if the bride-price has been spent, they manifest complete indifference to her conduct. Maidens who no longer expect marriage are not restrained at all, if they observe decorum it is only out of respect to custom." Westermarck (_History of Human Marriage_, pp. 123 et seq.) also shows the connection between the high estimates of virginity and the conception of woman as property, and returning to the question in his later work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_ (vol. ii, Ch. XLII), after pointing out that "marriage by purchase has thus raised the standard of female chastity," he refers (p. 437) to the significant fact that the seduction of an unmarried girl "is chiefly, if not exclusively, regarded as an offense against the parents or family of the girl," and there is no indication that it is ever held by savages that any wrong has been done to the woman herself. Westermarck recognizes at the same time that the preference given to virgins has also a biological basis in the instinctive masculine feeling of jealousy in regard to women who have had intercourse with other men, and especially in the erotic charm for men of the emotional state of shyness which accompanies virginity. (This point has been dealt with in the discussion of Modesty in vol. i of these _Studies_.)
It is scarcely necessary to add that the insistence on the virginity of brides is by no means confined, as A.B. Ellis seems to imply, to uncivilized peoples, nor is it necessary that wife-purchase should always accompany it. The preference still persists, not only by virtue of its natural biological basis, but as a refinement and extension of the idea of woman as property, among those civilized peoples who, like ourselves, inherit a form of marriage to some extent based on wife-purchase. Under such conditions a woman's chastity has an important social function to perform, being, as Mrs. Mona Caird has put it (_The Morality of Marriage_, 1897, p. 88), the watch-dog of man's property. The fact that no element of ideal morality enters into the question is shown by the usual absence of any demand for ante-nuptial chastity in the husband.
It must not be supposed that when, as is most usually the case, there is no complete and permanent prohibition of extra-nuptial intercourse, mere unrestrained license prevails. That has probably never happened anywhere among uncontaminated savages. The rule probably is that, as among the tribes at Torres Straits (_Reports Cambridge Anthropological Expedition_, vol. v, p. 275), there is no complete continence before marriage, but neither is there any unbridled license.
The example of Tahiti is instructive as regards the prevalence of chastity among peoples of what we generally consider low grades of civilization. Tahiti, according to all who have visited it, from the earliest explorers down to that distinguished American surgeon, the late Dr. Nicholas Senn, is an island possessing qualities of natural beauty and climatic excellence, which it is impossible to rate too highly. "I seemed to be transported into the garden of Eden," said Bougainville in 1768. But, mainly under the influence of the early English missionaries who held ideas of theoretical morality totally alien to those of the inhabitants of the islands, the Tahitians have become the stock example of a population given over to licentiousness and all its awful results. Thus, in his valuable _Polynesian Researches_ (second edition, 1832, vol. i, Ch. IX) William Ellis says that the Tahitians practiced "the worst pollutions of which it was possible for man to be guilty," though not specifying them. When, however, we carefully examine the narratives of the early visitors to Tahiti, before the population became contaminated by contact with Europeans, it becomes clear that this view needs serious modification. "The great plenty of good and nourishing food," wrote an early explorer, J.R. Forster (_Observations Made on a Voyage Round the World_, 1778, pp. 231, 409, 422), "together with the fine climate, the beauty and unreserved behavior of their females, invite them powerfully to the enjoyments and pleasures of love. They begin very early to abandon themselves to the most libidinous scenes. Their songs, their dances, and dramatic performances, breathe a spirit of luxury." Yet he is over and over again impelled to set down facts which bear testimony to the virtues of these people. Though rather effeminate in build, they are athletic, he says. Moreover, in their wars they fight with great bravery and valor. They are, for the rest, hospitable. He remarks that they treat their married women with great respect, and that women generally are nearly the equals of men, both in intelligence and in social position; he gives a charming description of the women. "In short, their character," Forster concludes, "is as amiable as that of any nation that ever came unimproved out of the hands of Nature," and he remarks that, as was felt by the South Sea peoples generally, "whenever we came to this happy island we could evidently perceive the opulence and happiness of its inhabitants." It is noteworthy also, that, notwithstanding the high importance which the Tahitians attached to the erotic side of life, they were not deficient in regard for chastity. When Cook, who visited Tahiti many times, was among "this benevolent humane" people, he noted their esteem for chastity, and found that not only were betrothed girls strictly guarded before marriage, but that men also who had refrained from sexual intercourse for some time before marriage were believed to pass at death immediately into the abode of the blessed. "Their behavior, on all occasions, seems to indicate a great openness and generosity of disposition. I never saw them, in any misfortune, labor under the appearance of anxiety, after the critical moment was past. Neither does care ever seem to wrinkle their brow. On the contrary, even the approach of death does not appear to alter their usual vivacity" (_Third Voyage of Discovery_, 1776-1780). Turnbull visited Tahiti at a later period (_A Voyage Round the World in 1800_, etc., pp. 374-5), but while finding all sorts of vices among them, he is yet compelled to admit their virtues: "Their manner of addressing strangers, from the king to the meanest subject, is courteous and affable in the extreme...They certainly live amongst each other in more harmony than is usual amongst Europeans. During the whole time I was amongst them I never saw such a thing as a battle...I never remember to have seen an Otaheitean out of temper. They jest upon each other with greater freedom than the Europeans, but these jests are never taken in ill part...With regard to food, it is, I believe, an invariable law in Otaheite that whatever is possessed by one is common to all." Thus we see that even among a people who are commonly referred to as the supreme example of a nation given up to uncontrolled licentiousness, the claims of chastity were admitted, and many other virtues vigorously flourished. The Tahitians were brave, hospitable, self-controlled, courteous, considerate to the needs of others, chivalrous to women, even appreciative of the advantages of sexual restraint, to an extent which has rarely, if ever, been known among those Christian nations which have looked down upon them as abandoned to unspeakable vices.