The best way seems to me to
confront the question with entire frankness.
There are, generally speaking, two points of view, two conditions of
the world's attitude toward these matters; the first, the conventional
one of good folks and good print everywhere, repressing any direct
statement of them, and making allusions only at second or third
hand--(as the Greeks did of death, which, in Hellenic social culture,
was not mention'd point-blank, but by euphemisms.) In the civilization
of to-day, this condition--without stopping to elaborate the arguments
and facts, which are many and varied and perplexing--has led to states
of ignorance, repressal, and cover'd over disease and depletion,
forming certainly a main factor in the world's woe. A nonscientific,
non-esthetic, and eminently non-religious condition, bequeath'd to us
from the past, (its origins diverse, one of them the far-back lessons
of benevolent and wise men to restrain the prevalent coarseness
and animality of the tribal ages--with Puritanism, or perhaps
Protestantism itself for another, and still another specified in the
latter part of this memorandum)--to it is probably due most of the ill
births, inefficient maturity, snickering pruriency, and of that human
pathologic evil and morbidity which is, in my opinion, the keel and
reason-why of every evil and morbidity. Its scent, as of something
sneaking, furtive, mephitic, seems to lingeringly pervade all modern
literature, conversation, and manners.
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