Now almost all the world wear crisped hair and beards, carrying
on their faces the token of their filthy lust like stinking
goats. Their locks are curled with hot irons, and instead of
wearing caps they bind their heads with fillets. A knight seldom
appears in public with his head uncovered, and properly shaved,
according to the apostolic precept (I Corinthians, Chapter XI,
verses 7 and 14)."
We have seen that there is good reason for assuming a certain fundamental
tendency whereby the most various peoples of the world, at all events in
the person of their most intelligent members, recognize and accept a
common ideal of feminine beauty, so that to a certain extent beauty may be
said to have an objectively aesthetic basis. We have further found that
this aesthetic human ideal is modified, and very variously modified in
different countries and even in the same country at different periods, by
a tendency, prompted by a sexual impulse which is not necessarily in
harmony with aesthetic cannons, to emphasize, or even to repress, one or
other of the prominent secondary sexual characters of the body. We now
come to another tendency which is apt to an even greater extent to limit
the cultivation of the purely aesthetic ideal of beauty: the influences of
national or racial type.
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