on is away from the end of Nature. But we do not live in a
state of Nature which answers to such demands; all our life is
"unnatural." And as soon as we begin to restrain the free play of sexual
impulse toward sexual ends, at once auto-erotic phenomena inevitably
spring up on every side. There is no end to them; it is impossible to say
what finest elements in art, in morals, in civilization generally, may not
really be rooted in an auto-erotic impulse. "Without a certain overheating
of the sexual system," said Nietzsche, "we could not have a Raphael."
Auto-erotic phenomena are inevitable. It is our wisest course to recognize
this inevitableness of sexual and transmuted sexual manifestations under
the perpetual restraints of civilized life, and, while avoiding any
attitude of excessive indulgence or indifference,[352] to avoid also any
attitude of excessive horror, for our horror not only leads to the facts
being effectually veiled from our sight, but itself serves to manufacture
artificially a greater evil than that which we seek to combat.

The sexual impulse is not, as some have imagined, the sole root of the
most massive human emotions, the most brilliant human aptitudes,--of
sympathy, of art, of religion. In the complex human organism, where all
the parts are so many-fibred and so closely interwoven, no great
manifestation can be reduced to one single source. But it largely enters
into and molds all of these emotions and aptitudes, and that by virtue of
its two most peculiar characteristics: it is, in the first place, the
deepest and most volcanic of human impulses, and, in the second
place,--unlike the only other human impulse with which it can be compared,
the nutritive impulse,--it can, to a large extent, be transmuted into a
new force capable of the strangest and most various uses. So that in the
presence of all these manifestations we may assert that in a real sense,
though subtly mingled with very diverse elements, auto-erotism everywhere
plays its part. In the phenomena of auto-erotism, when we take a broad
view of those phenomena, we are concerned, not with a form of insanity,
not necessarily with a form of depravity, but with the inevitable
by-products of that mighty process on which the animal creation rests.

FOOTNOTES:

[289] For a bibliography of masturbation, see Rohleder, _Die
Masturbation_, pp. 11-18; also, Arthur MacDonald, _Le Criminel Type_, pp.
227 et seq.; cf. G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_,