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Rh procreation the most sublime act of their vital energies, and summon nature with pride to be a witness of it, the flowers with their display of brilliant colors and their fragrance, the birds, "warbling sweet the nuptial lay," the fire-fly with its brilliant ray of light, the mammiferous animals by the roars and growls of then wooings and the fury of their rival—combats man alone is ashamed of his most powerful instinct and conceals it like a crime.

To be sure man has not been of this opinion in all ages; Tartuffe has not been always his guide in ethical matters. I do not refer to man in a state of nature but in a condition of high civilization. A civilization, abundant, intellectually and morally profound, whose ideality far surpassed that of our modern civilization—the civilization of India and Greece—considered the relations between the sexes from a natural and unprejudiced point of view; it held the human form divine in equal estimation, without seeing anything more indecent in one organ than in another, it had no bashfulness in regard to the nude, consequently could behold it with a pure eye, without any corrupt secret thoughts. It saw in the union of two individuals of opposite sexes, the sacred design of reproduction alone, which consecrated this act as necessary and sublime, thus preventing the possibility of unworthy suggestions and trains of thought in a normal and ripened intellect. The Indian as well as the Greek civilization had not obscured and perverted this elementary impulse in man like our own civilization, and therefore was still penetrated with the natural admiration and gratitude for the process which is the source of all life throughout the universe, the process of reproduction. It paid honors to the organs which are involved in this vital action, it placed representations of them as symbols of fruitfulness in the temples public places and dwellings, invented special