harmlessness of sexual abstinence we find an intermediate party of authorities whose opinions are more qualified.  Many of those who occupy this more guarded position are men whose opinions carry much weight, and it is probable that with them rather than with the more extreme advocates on either side the greater measure of reason lies.  So complex a question as this cannot be adequately investigated merely in the abstract, and settled by an unqualified negative or affirmative.  It is a matter in which every case requires its own special and personal consideration.

“Where there is such a marked opposition of opinion truth is not exclusively on one side,” remarks Loewenfeld (Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, second edition, p. 40).  Sexual abstinence is certainly often injurious to neuropathic persons. (This is now believed by a large number of authorities, and was perhaps first decisively stated by Krafft-Ebing, “Ueber Neurosen durch Abstinenz,” Jahrbuch fuer Psychiatrie, 1889, p. 1).  Loewenfeld finds no special proclivity to neurasthenia among the Catholic clergy, and when it does occur, there is no reason to suppose a sexual causation.  “In healthy and not hereditarily neuropathic men complete abstinence is possible without injury to the nervous system.”  Injurious effects, he continues, when they appear, seldom occur until between twenty-four and thirty-six years of age, and even then are not usually serious enough to lead to a visit to a doctor, consisting mainly in frequency of nocturnal emissions, pain in testes or rectum, hyperaesthesia in the presence of women or of sexual ideas.  If, however, conditions arise which specially stimulate the sexual emotions, neurasthenia may be produced.  Loewenfeld agrees with Freud and Gattel that the neurosis of anxiety tends to occur in the abstinent, careful examination showing that the abstinence is a factor in its production in both sexes.  It is common among young women married to much older men, often appearing during the first years of marriage.  Under special circumstances, therefore, abstinence can be injurious, but on the whole the difficulties due to such abstinence are not severe, and they only exceptionally call forth actual disturbance in the nervous or psychic spheres.  Moll takes a similar temperate and discriminating view.  He regards sexual abstinence before marriage as the ideal, but points out that we must avoid any doctrinal extremes in preaching sexual abstinence, for such preaching will merely lead to hypocrisy.  Intercourse with prostitutes, and the tendency to change a woman like a garment, induce loss of sensitiveness to the spiritual and personal element in woman, while the dangers of sexual abstinence must no more be exaggerated than the dangers of sexual intercourse (Moll, Libido Sexualis, 1898, vol. i, p. 848; id., Kontraere Sexualempfindung, 1899, p. 588).  Bloch also (in a chapter on the question of sexual abstinence in his Sexualleben