Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/176

164 harmless as well as vicious pleasures; their aim is not the reduction hut the destruction of our natural desires. The joy-loving Greeks deified even the aberrations of our natural instincts; the ascetic condemns even their legitimate gratifications. In the world of the mind as well as in the wonders of the visible creation, in streams and passions, in woods and dreams, wherever the children of Nature sought a god, the anti-naturalists feared a devil; to the exponents of asceticism life is a penalty, and earth the devil's vanity-fair, "a fleeting show, for man's illusion given." They make joy a crime, they tell us that God delights in the mortification of his creatures, in the suppression of their natural affections: "If any man hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yea, and his own life, he can not be my disciple."

But this war against Nature is the pendulum's struggle against the law of gravitation; it is the schoolboy's attempt to obstruct the sources of the Danube. Swinging left, swinging right, the pendulum must return to the middle; the stream will find its way to the valley athwart all dams, in spite of all obstructions. We can not suppress the sources of a natural instinct; all we can achieve by such attempts is to divert the stream from its normal course—to turn a natural into an unnatural passion. Education, i. e., guidance, does not deserve its name where it is nothing but a blind struggle against Nature. Few parents know how much easier it is to guide than to suppress the natural propensities of a child. Obstinate vices are often merely instincts astray, perverted energies that might be made innocuous by guiding them back to their proper sphere—perverted faculties whose abuse might have been prevented by encouraging their right use. The enemies of Nature seem to believe that an instinct can be deadened by stifling its symptoms, but the history of the last eighteen centuries has demonstrated the fallacy of that principle. They tried to stop the stream: they have only succeeded in turning it from its natural course. The attempt to suppress the pursuit of natural sciences led to the pursuit of pseudo-sciences—to supernaturalism, demonism, and all sorts of hideous chimeras. The monastic exiles from human society peopled their solitude with phantoms. The suppression of healthful pastimes begot a passion for vicious pastimes, and made the fancied identity of sin and pleasure a sad reality. The suppression of rational freedom has led to anarchy: the pendulum swings in the opposite direction to re-establish the due equilibrium. The ordinance of celibacy became the mother of secret vices; intolerance is the parent of hypocrisy. Wherever asceticism has trampled the flowers of this earth, the soil has produced a rich crop of weeds. The pent-up well-springs of Nature have found new outlets through dark, underground currents that could not fertilize the fields, and have undermined the foundations of many useful buildings before they could regain the light of day. Whatever liberties we now enjoy had thus to force their way through