Through inheritance some children are congenitally lacking in ethical ideas, and for such the wisest educational measures are urgently called for. Self control is what the child needs to be taught, for by yielding to impulse and vice the very structure of the brain eventually becomes altered. In fact, many an insane patient is where he is because of yielding to his fancies, and is thus directly responsible for his condition. Every individual naturally has good and bad instincts, and the sexual passion often gives a coloring especially to those which are evil.
All these vicious tendencies act more powerfully in perversely inclined children, partly because their self-control is weaker, and partly because they have abused their sexual natures, while perverse heredity is very probably also operating in them. Very plainly, then, the parent or teacher who fails to realize that some of the children have sexual natures inclining to perversity makes almost a criminal error; and in view of this his position should always be one of watchful expectancy. To leave a child to find out the secrets of his sexual nature unaided is the gravest and most cruel mistake. If this be left to accident, or if the child be abandoned to the false teachings of his wicked schoolmates, then onanism with all its injurious effects is almost sure to follow; and the wrong information which he may have received, or the erroneous conclusions which he may have conceived, may direct him into the most darksome paths and to irreparable injury.
Children are notoriously imitative and peculiarly susceptible to the force of example, and consequently the greatest care should be taken to help them to form good associations. The boys must be watched for evidences of a tendency to effeminacy, or a fondness for girlish games, and the girls must be influenced against too great an enthusiasm for boyish sports and the danger of being "tomboys". Above all, the boys and girls must be encouraged to exercise sociability and to mix freely with the opposite sex.
We must in addition recognize at the time of puberty a strong and peculiar impressionability, and also that the early sexual excitations and lustful sensations are apt to imprint a lasting influence on the child's mind "imperative concepts". The impressions produced by the intensity of feeling of the sexual organisms are much deeper than most other impressions, and the mental images then pictured in the memory may, and probably will, excite lustful feelings, through the association of ideas, when they are recalled, suggested, or reproduced, even without actual stimulation of the sexual areas.
Most mature readers will, upon due reflection, appreciate that in their sexual dream life their imaginations are tinctured by or revolve around some particular concept, or that they are erotically responsive to some pretty regular and ever recurring line of action.
Furthermore, most men are enthusiastic, to a greater or less extent, and become sexually excited in their dreams and also when awake about some particular feminine quality, or article of feminine apparel, or peculiar situation; which enthusiasm, being incomprehensible to other men, is a personal secret that is carefully kept hidden. These various enthusiasms or mind-pictures, each of which is of importance only to the particular individual, can usually be referred back for their origins to the time of puberty when the special concepts were closely associated with the first emissions or with the first pleasurable sexual feelings.
Especially bear in mind, then, that the first strong sexual impressions which are felt by the pubescent child are apt to become burned into his nature, and that the accessory factors which caused the lustful feeling, or which were prominently connected with it, are, through the association of ideas and reminiscences, forever after liable to guide his fancy to such a degree that a visual perception, or even a recollection of the same concept which excited him originally, will excite him hereafter.
To recognize that these tendencies exist is to be forewarned in helping the pubescent child to gain a mastery over impulses which might develop into grave perversions. Few realize, unless their attention is specially called to it, how deep and lasting are these mental associations formed during adolescence. Without understanding these tendencies, men go throughout life blindly, not appreciating their sexual likes and dislikes, or their motives, or the significance of the mental stains from which those suffer who pollute the very source from which true manhood necessarily comes.