Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/494

 rise. The valve opens only during this great pressure, but it is always closed, carefully closed, and it ought to be our aim consciously to close it as tightly as possible, and to put such heavy weights on it that it may not open. In this sense do I understand, "Who can contain, let him contain," that is, let everybody strive never to get married, and having married, to live with his wife as brother and sister. But the steam collects and opens the valves; but we must not open them ourselves, as we do when we look on sexual intercourse as on a legitimate enjoyment. It is lawful only when we cannot abstain from it, and when it bursts forth in spite of our wish.

How are we to determine when we are not able to abstain from it?

How many such questions there are, and how insoluble they seem, whereas how simple they are when you decide them in your own case and for yourself and not in the case of others and for others. For others you know only a certain gradation: an old man abandons himself to sexual intercourse with a prostitute,—that is dreadfully disgusting; a young man does the same,—and it is less disgusting. An old man sensually caresses his wife,—it is quite disgusting, but less so than in the case of a young man with a prostitute. A young man has sensual relations with his wife, it is still less disgusting, but none the less disgusting. Such a gradation exists for others, and all of us, especially uncorrupted children and young people, know it very well; but in our own case there exists also something else: every man who has known no sexual indulgence, and every virgin, has the consciousness (frequently quite bedimmed by false conceptions) that he or she must guard his or her purity, and the desire to preserve it, and sorrow and shame at its loss, no matter under what conditions. There is a voice of conscience which always says clearly afterward and at