Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/86

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has nothing else to oppose to immorality as it has been sketched in the preceding chapter than unnatural restraints and hypocrisy. Reason has no part in this senseless undertaking; she recognizes the claims of nature and its needs openly and frankly, but tries to regulate its manifestations by reasonable and truly moral conditions.

It is the task of mankind to follow nature under the guidance of reason. To depart from nature and to return to nature along the path or in the form of civilization is the evolutionary process of humanity and the humane spirit. Mere nature is coarseness or dependence; to reproduce, as it were, nature through reason, with consciousness — that is civilization and liberty.

Let us begin with liberty itself. The savage is free: but his natural freedom is subjugated in order to return at a later period as cultivated liberty come to consciousness of itself. Just so with morals. The natural relation of the sexes is lost in immorality and hypocrisy, in order to return as free love in moral consciousness and form. Natural liberty in the process of civilization passes through the school of slavery to true freedom,