The written portions of this book were already in a highly polished
state. They combined a limitless freedom of proposal with a smooth
urbanity of manner, a tacit denial that the thoughts of one intelligent
being could possibly be shocking to another. Upon this the doctor was
very insistent. Conduct, he held, could never be sufficiently discreet,
thought could never be sufficiently free. As a citizen, one had to treat
a law or an institution as a thing as rigidly right as a natural law.
That the social well-being demands. But as a scientific man, in one's
stated thoughts and in public discussion, the case was altogether
different. There was no offence in any possible hypothesis or in the
contemplation of any possibility. Just as when one played a game one was
bound to play in unquestioning obedience to the laws and spirit of the
game, but if one was not playing that game then there was no reason why
one should not contemplate the completest reversal of all its methods
and the alteration and abandonment of every rule. Correctness of
conduct, the doctor held, was an imperative concomitant of all really
free thinking. Revolutionary speculation is one of those things that
must be divorced absolutely from revolutionary conduct. It was to the
neglect of these obvious principles, as the doctor considered them, that
the general muddle in contemporary marital affairs was very largely due.
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