t of nervous maladies. But the evidence of ancient Greece or
Rome, of what Burton calls the "sotadic races" at the present time, of
European schools and prisons, ought to make us hesitate before we commit
ourselves to Krafft-Ebing's theory that hereditary affliction is a
necessary predisposing cause.[24]

In like manner, masturbation may be credited with certain cases of
acquired homosexual feeling. Undoubtedly the instinct is occasionally
evoked in some obscure way by the depraved habit of inordinate
self-abuse. Yet the autobiographies of avowed Urnings do not corroborate
the view that they were originally more addicted to onanism than normal
males. Ulrichs has successfully combated the theory advanced by
Tarnowsky, Prager, and Krafft-Ebing, if considered as a complete
explanation of the problem.[25] On the other hand, common experience
shows beyond all doubt, that young men between 16 and 20 give
themselves up to daily self-abuse without weakening their appetite for
women. They love boys and practice mutual self-abuse with persons of
their own sex; yet they crave all the while for women. Of the many who
live thus during the years of adolescence, some have undoubtedly as bad
a family record as the worst of Krafft-Ebing's cases show. Finally, as
regards the onanism which is a marked characteristic of some adult
Urnings, this must be ascribed in most cases to the repression of their
abnormal instincts. They adopt the habit, as Krafft-Ebing himself says,
_faute de mieux_.[26]

In justice to the theory I am criticising, it ought to be remarked that
Krafft-Ebing does not contend that wherever hereditary taint and onanism
concur, the result will be sexual inversion; but rather that wherever we
have diagnosed an acquired form of sexual inversion, we shall discover
hereditary taint and onanism. Considering the frequency of both
hereditary taint and onanism in our civilisation, this is not risking
much. Those factors are discoverable in a large percentage of male
persons. What seems unwarranted by facts is the suggestion that
inherited neuropathy is an indispensable condition and the fundamental
cause of homosexual instincts. The evidence of ancient Greece, schools,
prisons, and sotadic races, compels us to believe that normally healthy
people are often born with these instincts or else acquire them by the
way of custom. Again, his insinuation that onanism, regarded as the main
exciting cause, is more frequent among young peop