=Utterances and Conduct.= This at times results in most grotesque conflicts between utterance and conduct. We see for instance the much married Mrs. Eddy who as the witty Theodore Schroeder remarked, had many more husbands than children, stating that the pleasures of the flesh "are always wrong unless the physiologic factor can be excluded from consciousness" (a rather cryptic sentence) and also that "generation rests on no sexual basis."
Thy hysteric whose volcanic outbursts supply her with a morbid sexual relief for which she rejects all responsibility, for she is unconscious at the time is generally in her private and public life a woman of great repressions and perfect behavior, likely to sneer at every mention of a sex urge.
In other cases, platonic love is an attempt at creating an artificial value thru destroying a natural, biological human function.
=Oracles and Prophecies.= In ancient times it was observed that people deprived of any sexual gratification made at times mysterious utterances which were considered as an emanation of some divine intelligence.
Those utterances were nothing but hysterical ravings, accepted as oracles, prophecies, etc.
Our praise of continence, practiced even when it is unnecessary, (as in the case of lawfully married mates), is, after all, a survival of such superstitious beliefs based on misunderstood morbid phenomena.
Modern science, especially the new science of endocrinology, has shown that to every display of sexual activity corresponds an outpouring of hormonic secretions which benefits the entire system.
=Can We Save Our Vital Force?= Once upon a time it was assumed that continence enabled people to save their "vital force," to preserve the "resources of their body."
We know now that the gonads produce two secretions, one which would pass out of the body in any event, and one which flows directly in the blood and is the only one which can benefit the organism.
The various puritanical theories as to the great value of continence had been shaken many times by evidence from the biography of all the great writers, artists, philosophers, inventors and other men and women who have left the world much enriched by their creative labor and at the same time indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh.