It has been precedently observed, that self-pollution is more pernicious than excesses with women. Those who, on every occasion, bring a particular Providence into play, will assign for a reason, that it is the special will of God, in punishment of this crime. Persuaded as I am, that bodies have been, primordially from their creation, subjected to laws, which necessarily regulate all their motions, and of which the Deity does not probably change the œconomy, unless in a small number of reserved cases, I should not chuse to have recourse to miraculous causes, but when there is found a manifest opposition to natural ones. This is not the case here: every thing may be very well explained by the laws of the mechanism of the body, and by those of its union with the soul. This common custom of a recourse to supernatural causes, has been anciently combated by HIPPOCRATES, who speaking of a disease which the Scythians imputed to its being a particular punishment inflicted by God, makes this fine reflexion: “It is true (says he) that this disease comes from God; but not, in any other sense, than as all other diseases come from him: one does not come from him more than another; because all of them follow his laws of nature, by which every thing is governed[83].” SANCTORIUS, in his Observations, furnishes us with one primary cause of this particular danger: “Moderate coition (says he) is rather of service, when it is sollicited by nature: when it is sollicited by the imagination, it weakens all the faculties of the soul, and especially the memory[84].” It is not difficult to explain the cause of this. Nature, in a state of health, does not inspire with desires, but when the seminal vesicules are full of a quantity of liquor, which has acquired a degree of inspissation, that renders the resorption of it the more difficult; which is a sign that the evacuation of it will not sensibly weaken the body. But such is the organisation of the parts of generation, that their action, and the desires consequential thereto, are not only put into play, by the presence of a redundancy of seminal humor, but the imagination has also a great influence over those parts. Imagination can, by laying itself out for the excital of desires, and by busying itself with objects present, or of its own formation, put the parts into a state which produces those desires, and those desires impell to an action, so much the more pernicious for its being the less necessary.