health certificate at the wedding may give only an il-
lusion of safety, as the health of too many marriages
is destroyed by the escapades of the husband, and it may,
on the other hand, lead to a narrowing down under the
pressure of arbitrary theories, producing a true race
suicide. The question whether the healthy man is
the only desirable element of the community is one
which allows different answers. Much of the great-
est work for the world's progress has been created
by men with faulty animal constitutions whose parents
would never have received permission to marry from
a rigorous eugenic board.

But whatever the sociological reasons for hesitation
may be, the state legislators and physicians, the police
officers and social workers have no right to stop. They
must push forward and force the public life into paths of
less injurious and less dangerous sexual habits and cus-
toms. Their success will depend upon the energy with
which they keep themselves independent of the con-
trol of those who do not count with realities. The hope
that men will become sexually abstinent outside mar-
ried life is fantastic, and the book of history ought
not to have been written in vain. Any counting on
this imaginary overcoming of selfish desire for sex-
ual satisfaction decreases the chances of real hy-

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SEX EDUCATION

gienic reform. It would even be an inexcusable
hypocrisy of the medical profession if, with its consent,
one group of specialists behave as if sexual abstinence
were the bodily ideal, while thousands of no less con-
scientious physicians in the world, especially those con-
cerned with nervous diseases, feel again and again
obliged to advise sexual intercourse for then* patients.
We know to-day, even much better than ten years ago,
how many serious disturbances result from the suppres-
sion of normal sexual life. The past has shown, more-
over, that when society succeeded in spreading alarm
and in decreasing prostitution by fear, the result was
such a rapid increase of perversion and nerve-racking
self-abuse that after a short while the normal ways were
again preferred as the lesser evil.

And the reformers will need a second limitation of
then- efforts. They cannot hope for success as long as
they fancy that reasoning and calculation and sober
balancing of dangers and joys, of injuries and advan-
tages, can ever be the decisive factor of progress. They
ought not to forget that as soon as this whole problem
is brought down to a mere considering of consequences
by the individual, their eugenic hopes may be cruelly
shaken. However distressing it is to say it frankly, by
mere appeal to reason we shall not turn many girls

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
from the way which leads to prostitution, nor many boys
from the anticipation of married life. The girl in the
factory, who hesitates between the hard work at the
machine for the smallest pay, without pleasures, and the
easy money of the street, with an abundance of fun, may
in the regrettable life of prosaic reality balance the con-
sequences very differently from the moralist. She has
discovered that the ideal of virtue is not so highly valued
in her circles as in the middle classes. The loss of her
virtue is not such a severe hindrance in her life, and
even if she yields for a while to earn her extra money in
indecent ways, the chances are great that she may re-
main more attractive to a possible future husband from
her set than if she lived the depressing life of grief and
deprivation. The probability of her marrying and be-
coming the mother in a decent family home may be
greater than on the straighter path. It is, of course,
extremely sad that reality takes such an immoral way,
but just here is the field where the reformers ought to
keep their eyes wide open, instead of basing their appeals
on illusory constructions about social conditions which
do not exist. And if the boys begin to reason, their
calculations may count on a still greater probability of
good outcome, if they indulge in their pleasures. More
than that, the fate of certain European countries shows

[56]



SEX EDUCATION

that when it comes to this clear reasoning, the great
turn of the selfish man is from the dangerous prostitute
to the clean girl or married woman, to the sisters and
wives of his friends, and that means the true ruin of
home life.

What is the consequence of all? That the fight ought
to be given up? Surely not. But that instead of rely-
ing on physical conditions, on fear of diseases, on merely
eugenic improvements and on clever reasoning, the re-
form must come from within, must be one of education
and morality, must be controlled, not by bacteriology,
but by ethics, must find its strength not from horror of
skin diseases, but in the reverence for the ideal values of
humanity.

VIII

We must not deceive ourselves as to the gravity of
the problem. It is not one of the passing questions
which are replaced next season by new ones. State
laws and interstate laws may and ought to continue to
round off some of the sharp edges, institutions and asso-
ciations may and ought to succeed in diminishing some
of the misery, but the central problem of national policy
in the treatment of the youth will stay with us until it
has been solved rightly; illustrative instruction cannot

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
be such a solution. We must see with open eyes where
we are standing. The American nation of to-day is no
longer the America of yesterday. The puritanism
which certainly was a spirit of restraint has gone and
cannot be brought back. The new wealth and power,
the influx of sensuous South European and East Euro-
pean elements, the general trend of our age all over
the civilized world, with its technical comfort and
its inexpensive luxuries, the receding of religion and
many more factors, have given a new face to America
in the last fifteen years. A desire for the satisfaction of
the senses, a longing for amusements, has become pre-
dominant in thousandfold shades from the refined to the
vulgar. In such self-seeking periods the sexual desire
in its masked and its unmasked forms gains steadily in
importance and fascination.

America, moreover, is in a particularly difficult situa-
tion. This new longing for joy, even with its erotic
touch, brings with it many valuable enrichments of
every national life, not least among them the spreading
of the sense of beauty. But what is needed is a whole-
some national self-control by which an antisocial growth
of these emotions will be suppressed. Our present-day
American life so far lacks these conditions for the truly
harmonious organization of the new tendencies. There

[58]



SEX EDUCATION

are many causes for it. The long puritanic past did
not allow that slow European training in aesthetic
and harmless social enjoyments. Moreover, the wide-
spread wealth, the feeling of democratic equality, the
faintness of truly artistic interests in the masses, all
reinforce the craving for the mere tickling of the senses,
for amusement of the body, for vaudeville on the stage
and in life. The sexual element in this wave of enjoy-
ment becomes reinforced by the American position of
the woman outside of the family circle. Her contact
with men has been multiplied, her right to seek joy in
every possible way has become the corollary of her new
independence, her position has become more exposed
and more dangerous. And in addition to all this, the
chief factor, which alone would be sufficient to give to the
situation a threatening aspect: American educational-
ists do not believe in discipline. As long as the com-
munity was controlled by the moral influence of
puritanism, the lack of training in subordination under
social authority and obedient discipline was without
danger, while it strengthened the spirit of political
liberty. But to-day, in the period of the new anti-
puritanic life, the lack of discipline in education means
an actual threat to the social safety.

In such a situation what can be more fraught with
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
dangers than to abolish the policy of silence and to up-
hold the policy of talking and talking about sexual
matters with those whose minds were still untouched by
the lure. It means to fill the atmosphere in which the
growing adolescent moves with sultry ideas, it means
to distort the view of the social surroundings, it means
to stir up the sexual desires and to teach children how
to indulge hi them without immediate punishment.
Just as in a community of graft and corruption the in-
dividual soon loses the finer feeling for honesty, and
crime flourishes simply because every one knows that
nobody expects anything better, so in a community in
which sexual problems are the lessons of the youth and
the dinner talk of the adult, the feeling of respect for
man's deepest emotions fades away. Man and woman
lose the instinctive shyness in touching on this sacred
ground, and as the organic desires push and push to-
ward it, the youth soon discovers that the barriers to
the forbidden ground are removed and that in their
place stands a simple signal with a suggestive word of
warning against some easily avoided traps.

From a psychological point of view the right policy
would be to reduce the external temptations, above all,
the opportunities for contact. Coeducation, for in-
stance, was morally without difficulties twenty years

[60]



SEX EDUCATION

ago, but it is unfit in high schools and colleges for the
eastern part of the nation in the atmosphere of to-day.
Moreover, the aesthetic spirit ought to be educated
systematically, and above all, the whole education of
the youth ought to be built on discipline; the lesson by
which the youth learns to overcome the desire and to
inhibit the will is the most essential for the young
American of to-morrow. The policy of silence has
never meant that a girl should grow up without the
consciousness that the field of sexual facts exists in our
social world; on the contrary, those feelings of shame
and decency which belong to the steady learning of a
clean child from the days of the nursery have strongly
impressed on the young soul that such regions are real,
but that they must not be approached by curiosity or
self-seeking wilfulness. This instinct itself brought
something of ideal value, of respect and even of rever-
ence into the most trivial life, however often it be-
came ruined by foul companionship. To strengthen
this instinctive emotion of mysterious respect, which
makes the young mind shrink from brutal intrusion, will
remain the wisest policy, as long as we cannot change
that automatic mechanism of human nature by which
the sexual thought stimulates the sexual organs. The
masses are, of course, in favour of the opposite pro-

[61]



PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
gramme, which is in itself only another symptom of the
erotic atmosphere into which the new antipuritanic
nation has come. That mechanism of the nervous
system furnishes them a pleasant excitement when they
read and hear the discussions and plays which bristle
with sexual instruction. The magazines which, with
the best intentions, fight for the new policy, easily find
millions of readers; the plays with their erotic overflow
and the moral ending are crowded, and mostly by those
who hardly need the instruction any longer. A nation
which tries to lift its sexual morality by dragging the
sexual problems to the street for the inspection of the
crowd, without shyness and without shame, and which
wilfully makes them objects of gossip and stage enter-
tainment, is doing worse than Munchausen when he tried
to lift himself by his scalp. It seems less important
that the youth learn the secrets of sexual intercourse
than that their teachers and guardians learn the ele-
ments of physiological psychology; the sexual sins of
the youth start from the educational sins of the elders.

It is easy to say, as the social reformers and the vice
commissioners and the sex instructors and many others
have repeated in ever new forms, that "all children's
questions should be answered truthfully," and to work
up the whole sermon to the final trumpet call, "The

[621



SEX EDUCATION

truth shall make you free." Yet this is entirely usele'ss
as long as we have not denned what we mean by free-
dom, and above all what we mean by truth. If the
child enjoys the beautiful softness of the butterfly's
coloured wing, it is surely a truth, if we teach him that
seen under the microscope in reality there is no softness
there, but large ugly bumps and hollows and that the
beautiful impression is nothing but an illusion. But
is this truth of the microscope the only truth, and is
science the only truth, and is there ever only one truth
about the concrete facts of reality? Does truth in this
sense not simply mean a certain order into which we
bring our experience in the service of certain purposes
of thought? We may approach the chaos of life ex-
perience with different purposes, and led by any one of
them we may reach that consistent unity of ideas for
the limited outlook which we call truth. The chemist
has a right to consider everything in the world as chem-
ical substances, and the mathematician may take the
same things as geometric objects. And yet he who
seeks a meaning in these thirgs and a value and an
inner development may come to another kind of truth.
Only a general philosophy of life can ultimately grade
and organize those various relative truths and combine
them in an all-embracing unity.

[63]



PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
No doubt the physician's scientific discoveries and
observations are perfectly true. Man is an animal, and
anatomical and physiological conditions control his
existence, and if we want to understand this animal's
life and want to keep it healthy, we have to ask for the
truth of the physician. But shame upon him who
wants to educate youth toward the view that man as an
animal is the true man! If we educate at all, we edu-
cate in the service of culture and civilization. All
building up of the youthful mind is itself service to
human progress. But this human progress is not a
mere growth of the animal race. It has its total mean-
ing in the understanding of man as a soul, determined
by purposes and ideals. Not the laws of physiology,
but the demands of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and religion
control the man who makes history and who serves
civilization. He who says that the child's questions
ought to be answered truthfully means in this connec-
tion that lowest truth of all, the truth of physiology,
and forgets that when he opens too early the mind of
the boy and the girl to this materialistic truth he at the
same time closes it, and closes it perhaps forever, to
that richer truth in which man is understood as historic
being, as agent for the good and true and beautiful and
eternal.

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SEX EDUCATION

Give to the child the truth, but that truth which
makes life worth living, that truth which teaches him
that life is a task and a duty, and that his true health
and soundness and value will depend upon the energy
with which he makes the world and his own body with
its selfish desires subservient to unselfish ideals. If you
mean by the truth that half-truth of man as a sexual
creature of flesh and nerves, the child to whom you
offer it will be led to ever new questions, and if you go
on answering them truthfully as the new fashion sug-
gests, your reservoir will soon be emptied, even if the
six volumes of Havelock Ellis' "Psychology of Sex" are
fully at your disposal. But the more this species of
truth is given out, the more life itself, for which you
educate the child, will appear to him unworthy and
meaningless. If the truth of civilized life is merely
that which natural science can analyze, then life has
lost its honour and its loyalty, its enthusiasm and its
value. He who sees the truth in the idealistic aspect of
man will not necessarily evade the curious question of
the child who is puzzled about the naturalistic processes
around him. But instead of whetting his appetite
for unsavoury knowledge, he will seriously influence
the young mind to turn the attention into the opposite
direction. He will speak to him about the fact that

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY

y

there is something animal-like in the human being, but
will add that the true values of life lie just in overcoming
the low instincts in the interest of high aims. He will
point to those hidden naturalistic realities as something
not overimportant, but as something which a clean
boy and girl do not ask about and with which only the
imagination of bad companions is engaged. An in-
stinctive indifference and aversion to the contact with
anything low and impure can easily be developed in
every healthy child amid clean surroundings. Why is the
boy to h've and to die for the honour of his country?
Why is he to devote himself to the search for knowl-
edge? Why is he to fight for the growth of morality?
Why does he not confine himself to mere seeking for
comfort and ease and satisfaction of the senses? All
which really creates civilization and human progress
depends upon symbols and belief. As soon as we make
all those symbols of the historic community, all the
ideals of honour and devotion, righteousness and beauty,
glory and faithfulness, mere matters of scientific calcula-
tion, they stare us in the face as sheer absurdities; and
yet we might again misname that as truth. Then it is
the untruth which makes us free, it is the non-scientific,
humanistic aspect which liberates us from the slavery
of our low desires.

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SEX EDUCATION

Certainly there will always be some wild boys and
girls in the school who try to spread filthy knowledge,
but if the atmosphere is filled with respect and rever-
ence, and the minds are trained by inner discipline and
morality, the contagion of such mischievous talk will
reach only those children who have the disposition of the
degenerate. The majority will remain uncontami-
nated. Plenty of lewd literature in the circulars of the
quacks and even in the sensational newspapers will
reach their eye and their brain, and yet it will leave not
the slightest trace. The trained, clean mind develops
a moral antitoxin which at every pulsebeat of life de-
stroys the poisonous toxins produced by the germs which
enter the system. The red lanterns will never be en-
tirely extinguished in any large city the world over, but
the boy who has developed a sense of respect and rev-
erence and an instinctive desire for moral cleanliness
and a power to overcome selfish impulses, will pass them
by and forget them when he comes to the next street
corner. But the other, whose imagination has been
filled with a shameless truth and who receives as his
protection merely a warning which appeals to his fear
of diseases, may pass that red lantern entrance at first,
but at the next block his tainted imagination will have
overcome the fear, and with the reckless confidence that

[67]



PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
he will know how to protect himself and that he will
have good luck he, too, like the moth, will feel at-
tracted toward the red light and will turn back. We
can prohibit alcohol, but we cannot prohibit the stimu-
lus to sexual lust. It is always present, and the selfish
desire, made rampant by a society which craves amuse-
ment, will always be stronger than any social argument
or any talk of possible individual danger. The only
effective check is the deep inner respect, and we must
teach it to the youth, or the whole nation will have to
be taught it soon by the sterner discipline of history.
The genius of mankind cannot be deceived by philistine
phrases about the conspiracy of silence. The decision
to be silent was a solemn pledge to the historic spirit of
human progress, which demands its symbols, its con-
ventions, and its beliefs. To destroy the harvest of
these ideal values, because some weeds have grown up
with them, by breaking down the dams and allowing
the flood of truth-talk to burst in is the great psy-
chological crime of our day. There is only one hope
and salvation : let us build up the dam again to protect
our field for a better to-morrow.



[68]



SOCIALISM



II

SOCIALISM

THE history of socialism has been a history of false
prophecies. Socialism started with a sure conviction
that under the conditions of modern industry the work-
ing class must be driven into worse and worse misery.
In reality the development has gone the opposite way.
There are endlessly more workingmen with a comfort-
able income than ever before. The prophets also knew
surely that the wealth from manufacturing enterprises
would be concentrated with fewer and fewer men, while
history has taken the opposite turn and has distributed
the shares of the industrial companies into hundreds of
thousands of hands. Other prophecies foretold the end
of the small farmer, still others the uprooting of the
middle class, others gave the date for the great crash;
and everything would have come out exactly as the
prophets foresaw it, if they had not forgotten to con-
sider many other factors in the social situation which
gave to the events a very different turn. But it may be

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
acknowledged that the wrong prophesying was done
not only by the socialists, but no less by the spectators.
I myself have to confess my guilt. Many years ago
when I wrote my German book on "The Americans," I
declared with the ringing voice of the prophet that
socialism would never take hold of America. It was so
easy to show that its chief principles and fundamental
doctrines were directly opposed to the deepest creeds of
Americanism and that the whole temper of the popula-
tion was necessarily averse to the anticapitalistic fan-
cies. The individualistic striving, the faith in rivalry,
the fear of centralization, the political liberty, the lack
of class barriers which makes it possible for any one to
reach the highest economic power, all work against
socialism, and all are essential for American democracy.
Above all, the whole American life was controlled by
the feeling that individual wealth is the measurement of
individual success, and even puritanism had an inter-
nal affinity to capitalism. Hence socialism could not
mean anything but an imported frill which could not be
taken seriously by the commonwealth. In later edi-
tions of the book I modified my predictions slightly,
and to-day I feel almost inclined to withdraw my
prophecy entirely.

To be sure, I still think that the deepest meaning of
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SOCIALISM

Americanism and of the American mission in the world
is farther away from socialism than the spirit of any
other nation. And yet I do not say that I fear, or
that I hope, but I believe socialism has in no
other land at present such good chances to become
the policy of the state. The country has entered into a
career of progressive experiments; the traditional re-
spect for the old constitutional system of checks and
balances to the mere will of the crowd has been under-
mined. The real legislative reign of the masses has
just begun and it would seem only natural that such an
entirely new movement should be pushed forward by its
own momentum. If the genius of America, which was
conservative, turns radical, the political machinery
here would be more fit than that of any other land to
allow the enforcement of socialism. This will not come
to-day or to-morrow, but that socialism may suddenly
be with us the day after to-morrow is the possibility
with which the neutral observer must count. There is
no need of directly reversing the prophecies, as there
are many energies in the soul of the nation which may
react against this new tendency and may automatically
check this un-American economic capture. It is a
fight with equal chances, and which side will win cannot
be foreseen. But if socialism really has entered the

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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
.calm of practical possibilities, it becomes the duty of
everybody to study the new demands from his own
standpoint. The nation must see the facts from many
angles before it can decide on this tremendous issue.
Any one-sidedness, whether in favour of or against the
new programme, must be dangerous. In such a situa-
tion even the psychologist may be excused for feeling
tempted to contribute his little share to the discussion.
The central problem of the psychologist would evi-
dently lie in the question whether the socialistic reformer