It is, with regard to this organ of a natural necessity, as it is with regard to all the others, who are never beneficially brought into play, but when they are so by nature herself. Hunger and thirst point out the need of a recourse to meat and drink; but if more is taken of them than these sensations require, the surplusage hurts and weakens the body. The need of going to stool or urine are equally limited to certain natural conditions; but a bad habit may so far pervert or deprave the constitution of those organs, that the necessity of evacuation will cease to depend on the quantity of matters to be evacuated. Men subject themselves to false wants, and such is the case of those addicted to self-pollution. It is imagination and habit that sollicit them; it is not nature. They rob nature of what is necessary to her, and of which, for that very reason, she is so chary, and loath to part with it. In short, in consequence of this law of the animal œconomy, that humors will tend to where there is an irritation, so it will happen, that, after a certain time, there will be a continual afflux of humors to the irritated parts of generation: that case will come into existence, which HIPPOCRATES has already observed, “When a man exercises the act of coition, the seminal veins dilate, and attract the seed[85].” It may be remarked here, that there is in self-pollution particularly a danger for children before they arrive to the age of puberty. It is happily not common to find such monsters, of either sex, as to debauch children before that epoch; but it is but too common for children of that age to debauch themselves. A great number of circumstances may concur to keep a lewd commerce with others at a distance from them, or at least to moderate it; but a solitary lewdness meets with no obstacle, and knows no bounds. A second cause is, the tyranny which this odious practice gains over the senses, and which the author of the _English Onania_ describes very justly. “This impurity has no sooner subdued the heart, than it pursues the criminal every where: it takes hold of him, and engrosses his thoughts at all times and in all places: in the midst of the most serious occupations, even in acts of devotion, he is in prey to sensual desires and to lascivious ideas, which never leave him free[86].”