Instead of allowing my feelings to gather strength, I satisfied them out of hand.  Instead of five hours of heat and discomfort, I did not allow myself five minutes, if I could help it.

“The effect was marvelous.  I practically had no more trouble.  The thing rarely came to me at all by day, and though it continued at times by night, it became less frequent and less strong; often it did not wake me.  The erotic images and speculations that had begun to come to me died down.  I left off being afraid of my feelings, or, indeed, thinking about them.  I may say that I had decided that I should be obliged to lead a single life, and that the less I thought about matters of sex, the more easy I should find life.  Later on I had religious ideas which helped me considerably in my ideals of a decent, orderly, self-contained life.  I do not lay stress on these; they were not at all emotional, and my physical and psychical development do not appear to have run much on parallel lines.  I had a strong moral sense before I had a religious one, and a ‘common-sense’ which I perhaps trusted more than either.

“When I was about 28 I thought I might perhaps leave off the habit of regular relief I had got into. (It was not regular as regards time, being anything from one day to six weeks.) The change was probably made easier by a severe illness I had had.  I gave this abstinence a fair trial for several years (until I was about 34), but my nocturnal manifestations certainly gathered strength, especially when I got much better in health, and, finally, as at puberty, began to worry my waking life.  I reasoned that by my attempt at abstinence I had only exchanged control for uncontrol, and reverted to my old habits of relief, with the same good results as before.  The whole trouble subsided and I got better at once. (The orgasm during sleep continued, and occurs about once a fortnight; it is increased by change of air, especially at the seaside, when it may occur on two or three nights running.) I decided that, for the proper control of my single life, relief was normal and right.  It would be very difficult for anyone to demonstrate the contrary to me.  My aim has always been to keep myself in the best condition of physical and mental balance that a single person is capable of.”

There is some interest in briefly reviewing the remarkable transformations in the attitude toward masturbation from Greek times down to our own day.  The Greeks treated masturbation with little opprobrium.  At the worst they regarded it as unmanly, and Aristophanes, in various passages, connects the practice with women, children, slaves, and feeble old men.  AEschines seems to have publicly brought it as a charge against Demosthenes that he had practiced masturbation, though, on the other hand, Plutarch tells us that Diogenes—­described by Zeller, the historian of Greek philosophy, as “the most typical figure of ancient Greece”—­was