The sexual impulse is not, as some have imagined, the sole root of the most massive human emotions, the most brilliant human aptitudes,—­of sympathy, of art, of religion.  In the complex human organism, where all the parts are so many-fibred and so closely interwoven, no great manifestation can be reduced to one single source.  But it largely enters into and molds all of these emotions and aptitudes, and that by virtue of its two most peculiar characteristics:  it is, in the first place, the deepest and most volcanic of human impulses, and, in the second place,—­unlike the only other human impulse with which it can be compared, the nutritive impulse,—­it can, to a large extent, be transmuted into a new force capable of the strangest and most various uses.  So that in the presence of all these manifestations we may assert that in a real sense, though subtly mingled with very diverse elements, auto-erotism everywhere plays its part.  In the phenomena of auto-erotism, when we take a broad view of those phenomena, we are concerned, not with a form of insanity, not necessarily with a form of depravity, but with the inevitable by-products of that mighty process on which the animal creation rests.

FOOTNOTES: 

[289] For a bibliography of masturbation, see Rohleder, Die Masturbation, pp. 11-18; also, Arthur MacDonald, Le Criminel Type, pp. 227 et seq.; cf.  G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, pp. 432 et seq.

[290] Oskar Berger, Archiv fuer Psychiatrie, Bd. 6, 1876.

[291] Die Masturbation, p. 41.

[292] Dukes, Preservation of Health, 1884, p. 150.

[293] G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 434.

[294] F.S.  Brockman, “A Study of the Moral and Religious Life of Students in the United States,” Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902.  Many pitiful narratives are reproduced.

[295] Moraglia, “Die Onanie beim normalen Weibe und bei den Prostituten,” Zeitschrift fuer Criminal-Anthropologie, 1897, p. 489.  It should be added that Moraglia is not a very critical investigator.  It is probable, however, that on this point his results are an approximation to the truth.

[296] Ernst, “Anthropological Researches on the Population of Venezuela,” Memoirs of the Anthropological Society, vol. iii, 1870, p. 277.

[297] Niceforo, Il Gergo nei Normali, etc., 1897, cap.  V.

[298] Debreyne, Moechialogie, p. 64.  Yet theologians and casuists, Debreyne remarks, frequently never refer to masturbation in women.

[299] Stanley Hall, op. cit., vol. i, p. 34.  Hall mentions, also, that masturbation is specially common among the blind.

[300] Moraglia, Archivio di Psichiatria, vol. xvi, fasc. 4 and 5, p. 313.

[301] See his careful study, “Die Sexuellen Perversitaeten in der Irrenanstalt,” Psychiatrische Bladen, No. 2. 1899.