Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/492

 There is the sentiment of enamourment, most powerful in man, which has its inception between two persons of the opposite sex who did not know one another, and which leads to marriage; marriage has immediately a child for its consequence. There begins pregnancy and in consequence of it a sexual indifference of the conjugal pair toward one another, an indifference which would be very perceptible, and would interrupt the carnal intercourse, as it is interrupted in the case of the animals, if men did not consider the carnal intercourse a legitimate enjoyment. Such an indifference, which gives way to the care respecting the growth and the nursing of the child, continues to the child's weaning, and in a good marriage (in this does the difference of man from the animal exist) there begins again, with the weaning of the child, the feeling of enamourment between the same conjugal pair.

No matter how far we may be from it, there can be no doubt that it ought to be so, and for these reasons:

In the first place, sexual intercourse at a time when woman is not prepared for bearing children, that is, when she has no menses, has no rational meaning and is nothing but carnal enjoyment and a very bad and disgraceful enjoyment, as every conscientious man knows, which resembles the most heinous and unnatural sexual excesses. A man who abandons himself to it becomes more irrational than an animal, that is, he uses his reason for the purpose of departing from the law of reason.

In the second place, all know and agree to it, that sexual intercourse weakens and exhausts a man, and weakens him in the most essentially human activity,—in his spiritual activity. "Moderation," the defenders of the present order will say, but there can be no moderation, the moment there is a transgression of the laws established by reason. But the harm of the excess (and intercourse outside the free period is an excess) may for a man not be great with moderation (it is disgusting even to