Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/97

 feeling." But it is unfortunate that everybody sees in his own feeling something particularly sublime, true. It would be well to be guided by feeling if there were a kind of litmus paper such as that by which one can tell an acid from a base, to distinguish the true and sublime feeling from the false and low. There is no such paper, and therefore, if you admit guidance by feeling alone, all kinds of people, considering their own animal feeling as especially sublime, will descend lower than the animal level and sink themselves and their children in the sea of evil.

What can be more abominable than sexual intercourse? One need only describe this act in detail in order to evoke the most horrible repulsion. And therefore all the nations who have emerged from an animal state and entered upon spiritual life, always experience shame at sexual intercourse and its organs. If you ask yourself, why it is so, the answer is clear: in order that man, to the extent that he is a rational spiritual being, should refrain from this act and commit it only on those occasions when he is unable to struggle with the lust that drives him to it. In order that the species should continue as long as it is necessary, a passionate animal tendency to this act is implanted. What a distortion of human nature is the exaltation, the praising up of this act and of the parts of the body wanted for it -all that at the present time the so-called aesthetes and artists do!

Inventions for caressing the five outer senses, such as decorating houses and furniture beautifully, and chiefly dressing stylishly, music, perfume, highly-flavored food, smooth surfaces pleasurable to one's sense of touch: these are the things that excite