in the
victory over all possible prudential considerations. The same remarks
apply also to pregnancy, and to the other consequences of the sexual
life.

I am, moreover, sceptical _because the very persons to whom to-day we
have to look to effect the sexual enlightenment of children, are
themselves to a great extent also in need of enlightenment_; and in
respect of many of the questions about which the child has to be
enlightened, no general harmony of scientific opinion can as yet be said
to obtain. Take, for example, the question whether masturbation during
the period of sexual development is or is not a physiological act; or
the question whether sexual abstinence can do any harm to the health. It
is true that such differences in scientific opinion are not so extensive
as gravely to affect the question of the sexual enlightenment of the
child. In the matter of sexual abstinence, for example, the majority of
physicians are to-day agreed upon the view that such abstinence in
general does no harm; and that those, if any, whose health may be
unfavourably influenced by sexual abstinence, constitute at most a very
small minority. In my own view, the persons who may suffer from this
cause are those affected with hyperaesthesia of the sexual impulse, and
in whom the impulse is dominant to such a degree that it interferes with
all their alternative activities. But it is certainly only an extremely
small percentage of persons about whom, among medical men able to speak
authoritatively, that there is any difference of opinion.

A more serious matter is the extent to which erroneous views about
sexual questions still prevail among the populace. A father who starts
with the false assumption that his son must inevitably have intercourse
with so many prostitutes and must seduce so many girls--in a word, a
father who regards sexual abstinence as unmanly, or as necessarily
dangerous to health (and fathers who hold such opinions are no
rarity)--such a father must himself be sexually enlightened before we
give him the right to enlighten his son. Those also themselves greatly
need enlightenment who, for instance, advise a young bridegroom who has
always lived a chaste life to visit a prostitute before marriage, in
order to prove his sexual potency. As if potency in intercourse with an
experienced prostitute, skilled in all the tricks of her trade, were a
proof that the bridegroom will prove sexually potent in intercourse with
a chaste w