that I am addressing honest and sincere minds who only want to know the
truth. I can only work out the answer bit by bit.

To begin with, "Why is self-abuse wrong?" It comes under the head of
incontinence, which the Bible and all serious moral teachers so firmly
condemn. But why? Doctors are beginning to say that unless it is
excessive it does no particular harm either to the brain or the body.
Its victims worry about it--But need they? Here at least the answer is
easily found because it is supplied by those, and by all of those, who
indulge in the practice. I have never met a man who did not despise
himself for it. It invariably leaves a man out of conceit with himself.
I have heard men stoutly defending irregular relations with women, but
I have never heard this practice defended, even though it is
exceedingly common. Robust male sentiment is all against it. And the
reason is that, because it is an attempt to satisfy sexual craving in
an abnormal way, it always leaves psychic disturbance behind it. It may
relieve a physical tension, but it does nothing to satisfy the whole
man. It leaves a bad taste in the mind. Both mind and spirit as well as
the body enter into true sexual experience. They have no place in this,
and by reason of it the inner harmonies of a man's nature are
inevitably jangled.

I have noticed, too, a further and very serious consequence of this
habit. It plants deep in many men's minds, and especially in the minds
of sensitive and intellectual men, an abhorrence for the sexual side of
themselves. Just because they have never achieved freedom from them,
they hate and despise the passions that overcome them. This often leads
to very serious consequences when love enters into their lives. They
want then to dissociate love from all its physical concomitants. They
regard all things sexual as impure. It may even come to them as a shock