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Updated: June 23, 2025
We have life and health, if we have them, and it is only veiled prurience to inquire whence we got them. A man can't help having a father and a mother, I suppose; but he need not be always reminding himself of the fact: no other creature on earth does.
Payne's Terminal Essay, the general lines and scheme of which it follows closely. Even Mr. Payne's special phrases such as "sectaries of the god Wunsch," are freely used, and without acknowledgement. The portions on sexual matters, however, are entirely original. Burton argues that the "naive indecencies of the text of The Arabian Nights are rather gaudisserie than prurience."
It is a true psychological problem, this nausea which idle culture seems to produce for all that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. It is an unwritten chapter in the history of the human mind, how this literary prurience after new print unmans us for the enjoyment of the old songs chanted forth in the sunrise of human imagination.
In 1740, two years before the appearance of Joseph Andrews that middle-aged London printer had published Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, achieving thereby an enormous vogue. That amazing mixture of sententious moralities, of prurience, and of mawkish sentiment, became the rage of the Town.
So also Ariosto's ladies: the charming, bright women, coquettish or Amazonian, are frail and fickle to the degree which was permissible to a court lady, who should be neither prudish nor coquettish; doing unchaste things and listening to unchaste words simply, gracefully, without prurience or horror; perfectly well-bred, gentili, as Ariosto calls them; prudent also, according to the notions of the day, in limiting their imprudence.
There can be no doubt that, more especially in highly intelligent children with vague and unspecialized yet insistent sexual impulses, the artificial mystery with which sex is too often clothed not only accentuates the natural curiosity but also tends to favor the morbid intensity and even prurience of the sexual impulse. This has long been recognized. Dr. Beddoes wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century: "It is in vain that we dissemble to ourselves the eagerness with which children of either sex seek to satisfy themselves concerning the conformation of the other. No degree of reserve in the heads of families, no contrivances, no care to put books of one description out of sight and to garble others, has perhaps, with any one set of children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of curiosity. No part of the history of human thought would perhaps be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of the secret. And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames" (T. Beddoes, Hygeia, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59). Kaan, again, in one of the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one of the causes of psychopathia sexualis. Marro (La Pubert
How unctuously women embrace ideas which increase the value and importance of their urinal ducts! Modesty, morality, prurience, piety, are the effulgent underwear behind which they increase the mystery and charm of the mons veneris. Alas, they are the artists of sex and not men. Man has even thrown away the seductive cod-piece. The origins of ideas are varied and multiple.
A child's thirst for the interpretation of this knowledge is imperative and unsatiable not from prurience nor from evil-mindedness, but in obedience to a law of our nature, the child demands this knowledge and will get it.
They are too often confused in England now, and though our modern Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment. It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism.
Intellect can be served only by the finest properties of the blood; and if there be any indocility of soul, any impurity of purpose, any coldness or carelessness, any prurience or crude and intemperate heat, then base spirits are sent down from the seat of the soul to summon the sanguineous forces; and these gather a crew after their own kind.
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