When impotency falls like a thunderbolt on the head of two happy lovers, it is only a disease, a misfortune that concerns the physician and the pharmacist; but when it precedes love, it is cowardice, degradation, infamy. The honest man should never attempt to conceal it from himself or justify it; he should either courageously renounce love, a thing that does not concern him, or expose the sore and ask the armed hand of the surgeon to cut and cauterize it. Let him become a man again, and then see if he can aspire to the delights of sentiment. Before becoming a farmer, he should possess a farm. The complicated mechanism of our social organism, in the same manner as it offers to the thirst of ardent youth voluptuousness without love, imposes on many lovers, with a more cruel amputation, love without voluptuousness. Here we have the two chief sources of the thousand sorrows which human society prepares for those who love: "Voluptuousness without love," that is, all the degradations and shames of prostitution; "Love without voluptuousness," that is, all the tortures of enforced chastity. Between these two hells the enamored youth remains a long time suspended, until, to avoid death, he takes lechery and imagination into a somber old boat and flees away with them to hide in the reedy marshes and among the miasmas of self-abuse--the lowest of the degradations of love, and one which occupies a proper place between impotency and prostitution. Yes; as man enjoys all the Olympus of love, he must also submit to all its degradations. In the book which I will dedicate to the hygiene of love this problem will be thoroughly studied. Here I shall refer to it only so far as it concerns the physiology of sentiment. It is painful to admit it, but it is true: our modern society has rendered love so difficult to many unhappy creatures as to make them pass under the Caudine Forks of this cruel dilemma: either to buy voluptuousness and counterfeit love with it, or dream of love in the mire of solitary lasciviousness. In one way or the other, we are forced to become counterfeiters and to blush for ourselves at the manner in which we satisfy the most powerful of human needs.