Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/47

 play is so elaborate that it is only beginning to be understood. Some internal secretions stimulate, others inhibit, and the same secretions may under different conditions do either. This fact is the source of many degrees and varieties of energy and formative power in the organism. Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces which build up the man’s and woman’s distinctively sexual constitution: the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the varying emotional desires and needs. It is in the complex play of these secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical and psychic development, the various approximations of the male to female bodily and emotional disposition, of the female to the male, all the numerous gradations that occur, naturally as we now see, between the complete man and the complete woman.

When we turn the light of this new conception on to our old ideas of purity,—to the virtue or the vice, accordingly as we may have been pleased to consider it, of sexual abstinence,—we begin to see that those ideas need radical revision. They appear in a new light, their whole meaning is changed. No doubt it may be said they never had the validity they appeared to possess, even