in this act; and in casting about for some stronger stimulus I recurred to the forgotten idea of intercourse with animals.  I promptly tried to put the idea to a test, but failed several times, and finally succeeded, only to find that the result fell far short of my expectations.  Nevertheless I continued the practice irregularly for about three years—­or rather through that part of the three years that I spent at home, for while I was at school opportunity for such indulgence was lacking.  Long familiarity with the idea of intercourse with animals had made it impossible for me to feel the disgust with the practice which it inspires in most people; and even the perusal of Exodus xxii:  19 failed to make me abandon it.  Firmly as I believed in the Mosaic law the supremacy of the sexual impulse was complete.

As early as my sixteenth year I tried to abandon “self-abuse” in all its forms and have repeatedly made the same effort since that time but never with more than very partial success.  On two or three occasions I have stopped for periods of several weeks, but only to begin again and indulge more recklessly than before.  The deep depression which followed each failure, and often each act of masturbation, I attributed solely to the loss of semen, leaving out of account the fact that I expected to feel depressed and the utter discouragement and self-contempt which accompanied the sense of failure and weakness when, in the face of my resolution, I repeatedly gave way and yielded to the temptation to an act whose consequences I firmly believed must be ruinous.  I am now convinced that by far the greater part of this depression was due to suggestion and the humiliating sense of defeat.  And this feeling of moral impotence, this seeming helplessness against an overpowering impulse which, on the other hand, seemed so trivial when viewed without passion, eventually weakened my self-control to a degree guessed by no one but myself and sapped the foundations of my moral life in a way which I have constant occasion to deplore.

The foregoing paragraphs give, I think, a fair idea of my condition when I left home for a boarding school at the beginning of my seventeenth year.  From this time my experiences may be said to have run on in two distinct cycles—­that of the summer months when I was at home, and that of the remainder of the year when I was at school.  This fact will make some confusion and apparent inconsistency in the rest of this “history” unavoidable.  When I left home I was shy, retiring, totally ignorant of social usage, without self-confidence, unambitious, dreamy, and subject to fits of melancholy.  I masturbated at least once a day, though I was in almost constant rebellion against the habit.  In my more idle moments I elaborated erotic day dreams in which there was a peculiar mixture of the purely sensual and the purely ideal element; which never fused in my experience, but held the field alternately or mingled somewhat in the manner of