M. M. 1. Assure them if the loss of the semen happens but twice a week, it will not injure them. 2. Marry them. The last is a certain cure; whether the disease be real or imaginary. Cold partial bath, and astringent medicines frequently taken, only recal the mind to the disease, or to the delinquency; and thence increase the imaginary effects and the real cause, if such exists. Mr. —— destroyed himself to get free from the pain of fear of the supposed ill consequences of self-pollution, without any other apparent disease; whose parents I had in vain advised to marry him, if possible.
[24]. Sympathia aliena. Pity. Our sympathy with the pleasures and pains of others distinguishes men from other animals; and is probably the foundation of what is termed our moral sense and the source of all our virtues. See Sect. XXII. 3. 3. When our sympathy with those miseries of mankind, which we cannot alleviate, rises to excess, the mind becomes its own tormentor; and we add to the aggregate sum of human misery, which we ought to labour to diminish; as in the following eloquent lamentation from Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, Book II. 1. 200.
————————Dark,
As midnight storms, the scene of human things
Appear'd before me; deserts, burning sands,
Where the parch'd adder dies; the frozen south;
And desolation blasting all the west
With rapine and with murder. Tyrant power
Here sits enthroned in blood; the baleful charms
Of superstition there infect the skies,