The idea that masturbation is, generally speaking, dangerous, is by many restricted to the practice during childhood and youth, the belief in its danger at this stage of life being based upon the view that the organs are at this time insufficiently developed. But even this contention cannot be regarded as fully established. I will, in the first place, consider those cases only in which masturbation is practised after the formation of semen has begun, but when the processes by which bodily maturity is attained are not yet fully completed. To the theoretical assumption that masturbation is especially hurtful in cases in which the organs are not yet adequately developed, we may oppose the consideration that the completer development of organs is favoured by exercise. We cannot further discuss such theoretical speculations, which lack the firm foundation of experience. On the whole, I agree with the estimate of the consequences of masturbation expressed by Aschaffenburg,[88] a man to whom we are indebted for the refutation of many extravagant views. Experience teaches that almost all men, healthy and unhealthy, moral and immoral, have masturbated for some years, once or several times a week, towards the end of the second and during the beginning of the third period of childhood. In view of this experience, what right have we to maintain seriously that masturbation is, generally speaking, dangerous to health. It is, of course, possible to contend that these persons would have developed better if they had not masturbated. But there is equal ground for asserting the opposite. We possess no evidence whatever to show that those young persons who never masturbate are in after life stronger and healthier than the others. I know some persons who have never masturbated. In the case of some of these, it was because the impulse to masturbate was lacking; others, notwithstanding the existence of a strong impulse, refrained from masturbation under the influence of religious or ethical motives. In both of these groups, I have seen persons exhibiting the very morbid symptoms which Tissot and his followers referred to masturbation; and I was quite unable to convince myself that abstinence from masturbation secured any notable advantage. Whilst I do not assert that the morbid phenomena which I observed in these individuals arose in consequence of their refraining from masturbation, I consider that there is no justification for the converse assumption in the case of those who did masturbate. I believe that many of those patients who never masturbated were the subjects of congenital morbid predisposition, and that, as a direct consequence of this fact in many of them, the sexual impulse was of minimum intensity or developed exceptionally late; I consider, therefore, that the morbid manifestations in the domain of the nervous system were dependent, not upon the fact that they did not masturbate, but principally upon the congenital morbid predisposition.