We see men who must continually be debased by nursing their genitals; men with whom we come in contact with disgust, and who render filthy whatever utensil they touch; we see men who cry from their very souls: " Woe! woe! woe! would that I had died before I was damned!" We see men who must be in regular attendance upon doctors, sometimes in order even to urinate; we see men who pay enormous sums of money to doctors unless they dishonestly evade the payment of their bills or take their places in venereal dispensaries with the dregs and scum of the earth.
These men must suffer, and cause horrible suffering to others; and even with the best treatment and care they often cannot be assuredly cured, and often must forever be inferior to what they originally were. Still another of Nature's penalties is overlooked by most men. Those who have been at all observant will appreciate that the lustful act is very closely associated with the affections, with love, and with sentiment. Without this disposition of the mind the mere sensual enjoyment of the act, per se, would afford comparatively little pleasure. With the lower animals this is not so, and they cannot be immoral, experiencing no shame, being immune from venereal diseases, and having no tribal customs of marriage.
So it is not fair to the brute creation to say that the grossly lustful man " makes a beast of himself" when he throws aside the human elements of his nature. And it is certainly true that we can name no animal that is as bad as some men.
A man cannot, however, eliminate every spark of humanity from himself, nor cast aside entirely his affections and power of loving, and the worst that can be said about any man is probably not true. But these finer qualities of the affections can easily be perverted, in which event they will forever be indelibly contaminating factors in his brain, recurring to him unbidden both in his dream-life and in his memory even after marriage, flavoring the sexual congress with his own wife by a reversion of his recollection to former scenes of debauchery which have become with him imperious mental concepts.
These memory-pictures are reproduced to the mind without effort, spontaneously, by the association of ideas. The nioms sensualis, or voluptuous orgasm, is attended by an exalted hypersensibility of the cerebral cortex which renders the brain peculiarly receptive at that time to the operation of various concomitant influences, so that whatever impressions are brought prominently before the mind during the consummation of the sexual act are at subsequent periods apt to be recalled to the memory, unsummoned, through the association of ideas.
Promiscuous intercourse with women increases desire beyond natural limits, while it also strongly perverts the tastes and desires in a psychical sense, especially in neuropathic individuals; and in this way perversions of the genesic instinct are readily acquired.
That nation, whose men by the courage of their convictions exercise patriotism and sympathy and altruism and chastity and fidelity to themselves and to their women, has in it the elements of a high civilization which constantly tends to rise and to improve, and in the struggle for supremacy among the tribes of the earth it will surely be victorious over other peoples that are lewd and unchaste and ignobly ungallant and unjust to their women.
Even the skeptic who entertains the belief that after death there is no judgment to come, must pause to consider when he is reminded that there is, after all, such a thing as sin.
Blinded by the conception of sin as an offence against a supernatural power, it has been impossible for the individual to see that sin is foolishness in the natural world, and to realize his responsibility for being sin's fool. If it were desired to breed a degenerate human being, sinful, vicious, criminal, or insane, what would be the safest recipe? To engage his progenitors in an antiphysiological or antisocial life; to impregnate them thoroughly with alcohol or with hypocrisy, with syphilis or with selfishness, with gluttony or with guile, with an extreme lust of the flesh or an extreme pride of life.
When mankind has learned the ways by which degenerate beings have come to be, it will be able to lay down rules to prevent their production in time to come; but in order to do that, it must substitute for the notion of sin and its consequences in a life to come after death the notion of fault of organic manufacture and its consequences from generation to generation in the life that now is-must not rest satisfied to look outside nature for supernatural inspirations, divine or diabolic, but seek for natural inspirations within itself which it can observe, study, and manage."