to look at a living woman in a nude condition with the purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an essential feature in judging any object of beauty. But apart from this, an absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression of something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incompatible with beauty.
A nude woman may be beautiful in details, but the general effect is not beautiful; she inevitably creates the feeling that she is looking for something, and this induces disinclination rather than desire in the spectator. The sight of an upright female form, in the nude, makes most patent her purposelessness, the sense of her purpose in life being derived from something outside herself; in the recumbent position this feeling is greatly diminished. It is evident that artists have perceived this in reproducing the nude.
But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically beautiful. If the idea were justified that man's love for woman is the direct result of his sexual impulse; if we could agree with Schopenhauer that "the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-limbed sex is called beautiful only because the male intellect is befogged by the sexual impulse, that impulse being the creator of the conception of the beauty of woman," it would follow that the genitalia could not be excluded from the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy exposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful, and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as due to the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is in reality opposed to the conception of beauty. The man who is most under its influence has least sense of female beauty, and desires any woman merely because she is a woman.
A woman's nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense of shame. The easy superficiality of our day has given colour to the statement that the sense of shame has arisen from the wearing of clothes, and it has been urged that the objection to the nude arises from those
