Prudery is based on a similar duality. It expresses a consciousness that the nude can only be alluring, obscene, "indecent," and should therefore be feared and avoided. It is the defensive weapon of sexually excited, for the most part, slightly hysterical women, against the purely sexual, whose sphere they often extend amazingly. Prudery conceives sexuality as a distinct, restricted complex in consciousness. Such division is alien to woman and, where it exists, a hysterical condition, a condition of inner discord, is clearly indicated. We may take it that the obscene which affects normal men, affects only hysterical, inwardly discordant women who try to take shelter behind prudery. To the normal woman the obscene does not exist as a spiritual principle; she turns with a feeling of displeasure from all the lower sexual manifestations, and even finds them absurd. The elimination of personality of eroticism, the charm of which is felt by even the most highly differentiated man, has always been foreign to woman--she lacks the duality of erotic emotion which man is slowly and laboriously striving to overcome--a still further proof of the unbroken, synthetic emotion of woman.
_The Individual as an Epitome of the Human Race_
The biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel teaches us that the human embryo passes through all the stages of development traversed by its ancestors in their evolution from the lower forms of the animal world. Although each successive stage completely replaces the preceding one, the latter is there as its organic supposition. Man is not born as a human being until he has travelled over the principal portions of the road to evolution. This law, which establishes the natural connection of the individual with the whole chain of organisms, is continued in a psychogenetic law, not founded on the heredity of the blood but on the heredity of culture (and therefore quite independent of the doctrine of the origin of species). In the course of his development the individual repeats the psycho-spiritual stages through which the species has passed. But while the human body cannot sustain life until it is perfectly developed, the degrees of psychic perfection vary very considerably; not every individual reaches perfection; most men attain to some degree, but there are others who do not even acquire the rudiments.