ACTON'S WISDOM
215
candid. Other causes are flogging on the buttocks, as it was practiced
in the large public schools, and indeed life at school in general.
Just as in pornography no person, object, or idea is incapable of
being enlisted in the cause of sexual activity, in Acton's view of
the world almost no experience is exempt from the danger of pre–
maturely awakening appetite in the young. And though Acton regards
with apprehension what is pornography's
raison dJetre J
in both the
same process is taking place-the complete sexualization of reality.
Another important source of premature sexual activities is pre–
mature intellectual growth, and Acton reproves those tendencies in
modern education whose aim is to foster intellectual superiority at
the expense of more "wholesome" exercises. "For, as anyone may
observe," he remarks; "it is not the strong athletic boy, fond of healthy
exercise, who thus early shows marks of sexual desires, but your
puny exotic, whose intellectual education has been fostered at the
expense of his physical development." There are more fantasies going
on simultaneously in this sentence than one can easily count, and
the logic of the statement is, to say the least, peculiar. Putting these
to one side, however, we should note that such a passage raises a
question which we shall be forced to raise repeatedly: what, at a
given moment in the history of a culture, is the nature of "observa–
tion"; and correlatively what is the nature of "experience."
As
we
shall have repeated occasion to see, both observation and experience
are extremely selective-that is, extremely pre-conditioned-processes.
Acton continues his observations by saying that the chief danger in
early intellectual development is that boys will read works, especially
"classical works," which are almost "certain to excite sexual feelings";
and although he has no wish to be "prudish or to believe that boys
can or ought to
be
altogether kept from the risk of reading improper
stories or books," the dangers of such a course must be faced.
He reads in them of the pleasures, nothing of the penalties,
of sexual indulgences. He is not intuitively aware that,
if
the
sexual desires are excited, it will require greater power of will
to
master them than falls to the lot of most lads; that if indulged
in, the man will and must pay the penalty for the errors of the
boy; that for one that escapes, ten will suffer; that an awful
- risk attends abnonnal substitutes for sexual intercourse; and that
