Rudolf Sommer, similarly, in an excellent article entitled "Maedchenerziehung oder Menschenbildung ?" (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd.

i, Heft 3) advises that children should be made accustomed to each other's nakedness from an early age in the family life of the house or the garden, in games, and especially in bathing; he remarks that parents having children of only one sex should cultivate for their children's sake intimate relations with a family having children of like age of the opposite sex, so that they may grow up together.
It is scarcely necessary to add that the cultivation of nakedness must always be conciliated with respect for the natural instincts of modesty.
If the practice of nakedness led the young to experience a diminished reverence for their own or others' personalities the advantages of it would be too dearly bought.

This is, in part, a matter of wholesome instinct, in part of wise training.

We now know that the absence of clothes has little relation with the absence of modesty, such relation as there is being of the inverse order, for the savage races which go naked are usually more modest than those which wear clothes.

The saying quoted by Herodotus in the early Greek world that "A woman takes off her modesty with her shift" was a favorite text of the Christian Fathers.