It may be questioned whether this view is acceptable even for the warm climate of the south of Europe, where the impulses of sexuality are undoubtedly precocious.  It is certainly not in harmony with general experience and opinion in the north; this is well expressed in the following passage by Edward Carpenter (International Journal of Ethics, July, 1899):  “After all, purity (in the sense of continence) is of the first importance to boyhood.  To prolong the period of continence in a boy’s life is to prolong the period of growth.  This is a simple physiological law, and a very obvious one; and, whatever other things may be said in favor of purity, it remains, perhaps, the most weighty.  To introduce sensual and sexual habits—­and one of the worst of them is self-abuse—­at an early age, is to arrest growth, both physical and mental.  And what is even more, it means to arrest the capacity for affection.  All experience shows that the early outlet toward sex cheapens and weakens affectional capacity.”

I do not consider that we can decide the precise degree in which masturbation may fairly be called normal so long as we take masturbation by itself.  We are thus, in conclusion, brought back to the point which I sought to emphasize at the outset:  masturbation belongs to a group of auto-erotic phenomena.  From one point of view it may be said that all auto-erotic phenomena are unnatural, since the natural aim of the sexual impulse is sexual conjunction, and all exercise of that impulse outside such conjunction is away from the end of Nature.  But we do not live in a state of Nature which answers to such demands; all our life is “unnatural.”  And as soon as we begin to restrain the free play of sexual impulse toward sexual ends, at once auto-erotic phenomena inevitably spring up on every side.  There is no end to them; it is impossible to say what finest elements in art, in morals, in civilization generally, may not really be rooted in an auto-erotic impulse.  “Without a certain overheating of the sexual system,” said Nietzsche, “we could not have a Raphael.”  Auto-erotic phenomena are inevitable.  It is our wisest course to recognize this inevitableness of sexual and transmuted sexual manifestations under the perpetual restraints of civilized life, and, while avoiding any attitude of excessive indulgence or indifference,[352] to avoid also any attitude of excessive horror, for our horror not only leads to the facts being effectually veiled from our sight, but itself serves to manufacture artificially a greater evil than that which we seek to combat.