, and inducing
hyper-sensibility in his sexual apparatus. Partial impotence is not
unfrequently exhibited. In consequence of this sophistication of his
nature, the victim of inherited neuropathy and onanism feels shy with
women, and finds it convenient to frequent persons of his own sex. In
other words, it is supposed to be easier for an individual thus broken
down at the centres of his life to defy the law and to demand sexual
gratification from men than to consort with venal women in a brothel.

Krafft-Ebing assumes that males who have been born with neuropathic
ailments of an indefinite kind will masturbate, destroy their virility,
and then embark upon a course of vice which offers incalculable dangers,
inconceivable difficulties, and inexpressible repugnances. That is the
theory. But whence, if not from some overwhelming appetite, do the
demoralised victims of self-abuse derive courage for facing the
obstacles which a career of sexual inversion carries with it in our
civilisation? One would have thought that such people, if they could not
approach a prostitute in a brothel, would have been unable to solicit a
healthy man upon the streets. The theory seems to be constructed in
order to elude the fact that the persons designated are driven by a
natural impulse into paths far more beset with difficulties than those
of normal libertines.

Krafft-Ebing gives the details of five cases of "acquired" sexual
inversion. Three of these were the children of afflicted parents. One
had no morbid strain in his ancestry, except pulmonary consumption. The
fifth sprang from a strong father and a healthy mother. Masturbation
entered into the history of all.

It must be observed, in criticising Krafft-Ebing's theory, that it is so
constructed as to render controversy almost impossible. If we point out
that a large percentage of males who practise onanism in their
adolescence do not acquire sexual inversion, he will answer that these
were not tainted with hereditary disease. The autobiographies of
onanists and passionate woman-lovers (J. J. Rousseau, for example, who
evinced a perfect horror of homosexual indulgence, and J. J. Bouchard,
whose disgusting excentricities were directed toward females even in the
period of his total impotence) will be dismissed with the remark that
the ancestors of these writers must have shown a clean record.

It is difficult to square Krafft-Ebing's theory with the phenomena
presented by schools, both