There is some
danger in this respect; but not a serious or unavoidable one.
Doubtless there would be occasional lapses in a double-sexed college;
and so there are outside of schoolhouses and seminaries of learning.
Even the church and the clergy are not exempt from reproach in such
things. There are sects, professing to commingle religion and love,
who illustrate the dangers of juxtaposition even in things holy. "No
physiologist can well doubt that the holy kiss of love in such cases
owes all its warmth to the sexual feeling which consciously or
unconsciously inspires it, or that the mystical union of the sexes
lies very close to a union that is nowise mystical, when it does not
lead to madness."[31] There is less, or certainly no more danger in
having the sexes unite at the repasts of knowledge, than, as Plautus
bluntly puts it, having he wits and she wits recline at the repasts of
fashion. Isolation is more likely to breed pruriency than commingling
to provoke indulgence. The virtue of the cloister and the cell
scarcely deserves the name. A girl has her honor in her own keeping.
If she can be trusted with boys and men at the lecture-room and in
church, she can be trusted with them at school and in college.
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