ut whose sexual
emotions are, literally, continually dribbling from them. Schrenck-Notzing
knows a lady who is spontaneously sexually excited on hearing music or
seeing pictures without anything lascivious in them; she knows nothing of
sexual relationships. Another lady is sexually excited on seeing beautiful
and natural scenes, like the sea; sexual ideas are mixed up in her mind
with these things, and the contemplation of a specially strong and
sympathetic man brings the orgasm on in about a minute. Both these ladies
"masturbate" in the streets, restaurants, railways, theatres, without
anyone perceiving it.[225] A Brahmin woman informed a medical
correspondent in India that she had distinct though feeble orgasm, with
copious outflow of mucus, if she stayed long near a man whose face she
liked, and this is not uncommon among European women. Evidently under such
conditions there is a state of hyperaesthetic weakness. Here, however, we
are passing the frontiers of strictly auto-erotic phenomena.

_Delectatio morosa_, as understood by the theologians, is
distinct from desire, and also distinct from the definite
intention of effecting the sexual act, although it may lead to
those things. It is the voluntary and complacent dallying in
imagination with voluptuous thoughts, when no effort is made to
repel them. It is, as Aquinas and others point out, constituted
by this act of complacent dallying, and has no reference to the
duration of the imaginative process. Debreyne, in his
_Moechialogie_ (pp. 149-163), deals fully with this question, and
quotes the opinions of theologians. I may add that in the early
Penitentials, before the elaboration of Catholic theology, the
voluntary emission of semen through the influence of evil
thoughts, was recognized as a sin, though usually only if it
occurred in church. In Egbert's Penitential of the eighth or
ninth century (cap. IX, 12), the penance assigned for this
offence in the case of a deacon, is 25 days; in the case of a
monk, 30 days; a priest, 40 days; a bishop, 50. (Haddon and
Stubbs, _Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents_, vol. iii, p.
426.)

The frequency of spontaneous orgasm in women seems to have been
recognized in the seventeenth century. Thus, Schurig
(_Syllepsilogia_, p. 4), apparently quoting Riolan, states that
some women are so wanton that the sight of a handsome man, or of