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THE IDEAL OF INDIAN WOMANHOOD
of scientific knowledge cannot be arrested by the Senseless sermon of the moralist. Are wc, then, going to castrate all men and sterilise all women, to kcep them from the sinful act of sex-intercourse, when the creation of life will be independent of it?
It is shecr blasphemy to condcmn scx-act as an l atural sin. Incidentally, one may ask the curi. ous question : what arc natural sins ? Scx-impulse is natural. To suppress it, therefore, is unnatural, and sinful, if we talk in religious terris. For, that is violation of an order created by God. If God clid not sanction the commission of sex-act, cxcept for procreation, he could have spared human beings the infliction of the sex-impulse. He could ordain so that procrcation took place by the division of cells all through the process of biological evolution. As a matter of fact, it happens that way even in the human species. So, in the strict scientific sense, the enjoyment of sex-intercourse has very little to do with the process of procrcation. The relation between the two is only accidental. It is now theoretically known that the two events can be separated. Thus, with the higher biological forms, sex-intercoursc, cssentially, is the expression of an emotion generated by mutual attraction of the sexes.
Gandhi's reply to the bold charge made against him personally by the correspondent is apologetic. He claims to have practised Brahmacharya since he was thirty-three. That by itself is not a very credit
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