Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/84

 lish what one is tempted to call the essential unity of experience in the psycophysical organism. This is not a task for the police. It is not a task for suppressive societies.

After that difficulty has been disposed of, criticism, thinking of public morals, may propose to itself some such questions as these: Granting that literature has a profound influence upon conduct, are you prepared to say, with reference to any considerable number of definite cases, precisely what the nature of that influence is? Have you made, for example, any accurate discrimination between the effects produced in the psychophysical organism by the various sorts of literature in which the sex life and sexual emotion are more or less freely displayed? Are you sure that 'shocking' books are always harmful to public morals, or do public morals occasionally require to be shocked? Is it conceivable that candor, so 'brutal' that it employs words which are 'obscene,' and relates facts which are 'disgusting,' may be prophylactic—may provide, indeed, that vaccine against moral infection which reformers are seeking? Is it clear, for example, that it is less evilly inciting to young minds to refer to a prostitute as a 'daughter of joy,' as delicate euphemists refer to her, than to speak of her as a 'whore,' as Shakespeare speaks of her?

After endeavoring for a time in these matters to see 'the thing as in itself it really is,' criticism,