It is not difficult to explain the cause of this. Nature, in a state of health, does not inspire with desires, but when the seminal vesicules are full of a quantity of liquor, which has acquired a degree of inspissation, that renders the resorption of it the more difficult; which is a sign that the evacuation of it will not sensibly weaken the body. But such is the organisation of the parts of generation, that their action, and the desires consequential thereto, are not only put into play, by the presence of a redundancy of seminal humor, but the imagination has also a great influence over those parts. Imagination can, by laying itself out for the excital of desires, and by busying itself with objects present, or of its own formation, put the parts into a state which produces those desires, and those desires impell to an action, so much the more pernicious for its being the less necessary.
It is, with regard to this organ of a natural necessity, as it is with regard to all the others, who are never beneficially brought into play, but when they are so by nature herself. Hunger and thirst point out the need of a recourse to meat and drink; but if more is taken of them than these sensations require, the surplusage hurts and weakens the body. The need of going to stool or urine are equally limited to certain natural conditions; but a bad habit may so far pervert or deprave the constitution of those organs, that the necessity of evacuation will cease to depend on the quantity of matters to be evacuated. Men subject themselves to false wants, and such is the case of those addicted to self-pollution. It is imagination and habit that sollicit them; it is not nature. They rob nature of what is necessary to her, and of which, for that very reason, she is so chary, and loath to part with it.
In short, in consequence of this law of the animal œconomy, that humors will tend to where there is an irritation, so it will happen, that, after a certain time, there will be a continual afflux of humors to the irritated parts of generation: that case will come into existence, which Hippocrates has already observed, “When a man exercises the act of coition, the seminal veins dilate, and attract the seed[85].”
It may be remarked here, that there is in self-pollution particularly a danger for children before they arrive to the age of puberty. It is happily not common to find such monsters, of either sex, as to debauch children before that epoch; but it is but too common for children of that age to debauch themselves. A great number of circumstances may concur to keep a lewd commerce with others at a distance from them, or at least to moderate it; but a solitary lewdness meets with no obstacle, and knows no bounds.
A second cause is, the tyranny which this odious practice gains over the senses, and which the author of the English Onania describes very justly.
“This impurity has no sooner subdued the heart, than it pursues the criminal every where: it takes hold of him, and engrosses his thoughts at all times and in all places: in the midst of the most serious occupations, even in acts of devotion, he is in prey to sensual desires and to lascivious ideas, which never leave him free[86].”
Nothing can be more infeebling than this continual stretch of the mind, ingrossed by the same object. The self-pollutor, perpetually abandoned to his obscene meditations, is, in this regard, something in the case of the man of letters, who fixes all his attention on one point, and it is rare that such an excess is not pernicious. That part of the brain which is then in action, makes an effort, which may be compared to that of a muscle long and violently on the stretch: thence results, either such a mobility, that there is no stopping the activity of the part, which is notably the case of self-pollution, or an incapacity of action. Exhausted, at length, by a continual fatigue, these wretched beings fall into all the diseases of the brain; melancholy, catalepsy, epilepsy, imbecillity, loss of sense, weakness of the nervous system, and a croud of the like evils[87].
This cause of disorder does an infinite mischief to a number of young people, in that, when even their faculties are not as yet extinct, the use of them is perverted. To whatever vocation they devote themselves, there is no making a proficiency in any thing, without a degree of application, of which this pernicious habit renders them incapable. Among even those who dedicate themselves to nothing, and the class of these is but too numerous, there are some, whom that vacuity more than commonly misbecomes; an air of absence, of embarrassment, of giddiness, adds to the circumstance of their being good for nothing, that of their being disgustfully so.