could thus feel more kindly to persons guilty of cruelty, which has hitherto always seemed the one unpardonable sin.  Even criminals, if it is true that they are themselves often very insensitive, may, in the excitement of the moment, imagine that they are only inflicting trifling pain, as it would be to them, and that their victim’s feelings are really pleasurable.  The men I have known most given to inflicting pain are all particularly tender-hearted when their passions are not in question.  I cannot understand how (as in a case mentioned by Krafft-Ebing) a man could find any pleasure in binding a girl’s hands except by imagining what he supposed were her feelings, though he would probably be unconscious that he put himself in her place.

“As a child I exercised a good deal of authority and influence over my youngest sister.  It used to give me considerable pleasure to be somewhat arbitrary and severe with her, but, though I never admitted it to myself or to her, I knew instinctively that she took pleasure in my treatment.  I used to give her childish lessons, over which I was very strict.  I invented catechisms and chapters of the Bible in which elder sisters were exhorted to keep their juniors under discipline, and younger sisters were commanded to give implicit submission and obedience.  Some parts of the Imitation lent themselves to this sort of parody, which never struck me as in any way irreverent.  I used to give her arbitrary orders to ‘exercise her in obedience,’ as I told her, and I used to punish her if she disobeyed me.  In all this I was, though only half consciously, guided through my own feelings as to what I should have liked in her place.  For instance, I would make her put down her playthings and come and repeat a lesson; but, though she was in appearance having her will subdued to mine, I always chose a moment when I foresaw she would soon be tired of play.  There was sufficient resistance to make restraint pleasurable, not enough to render it irksome.  In my punishments I acted on a similar principle.  I used to tie her hands behind her (like the man in Krafft-Ebing’s case), but only for a few moments; I once shut her in a sort of cupboard-room, also for a very short time.  On two or three occasions I completely undressed her, made her lie down on the bed, tied her hands and feet to the bedstead, and gave her a slight whipping.  I did not wish to hurt her, only to inflict just enough pain to produce the desire to move or resist. My pleasure, a very keen one, came from the imagined excitement produced by the thwarting of this desire.  (Are not your own words—­that ‘emotion’ is ’motion in a more or less arrested form’—­an epigrammatic summary of all this, though in a somewhat different connection?) I did not undress her from any connection of nakedness with sexual feeling, but simply to enhance her feeling of helplessness and defenselessness under my hands.  If I were a man and the woman I loved were refractory I