It is the bad use of noble agencies that often constitutes vice. Nothing ignoble, was intended by the Great Designer, should grow out of the sexual privileges, and when nobly appreciated, for moral beings a greater happiness or pleasure has not been instituted. But by long prostitution of these privileges, vices have originated; beliefs have been established; customs have been founded; even religions have been constructed and modified to suit the wishes of designing “sexualists,” “free-thinkers,” Mormons, etc. Occasionally, dissatisfied members of one sex will establish an innovation, or a revolutionary commotion, demanding rights which they claim have been usurped from them, and sometimes thirsting for prerogatives belonging to the opposite sex. They agitate their cause until their isolated followers establish societies and churches, effecting discord in families, and no good to the world in general, and for themselves an unenviable reputation. Such individuals are often advocating reforms; temperance, charity, etc.; but when good comes out of one, evil grows out of ten. They often take a decided stand against the opposite sex, and when their true history is known, it will be often found that they have been suffering from unrequited love, disappointment in matrimony, deception in society, misplaced confidence, illegitimate pregnancy, etc.; or, they are phlegmatic and passionless; or, hermaphrodites; or wanting in some of the sexual appendages necessary to constitute a perfect man or woman. Then, without the complete sexual system, harmoniously balanced, all is imperfect.
My purpose in dwelling so much upon these mixed relations and disappointments, has been more especially to fully expose the predisposing causes of neuroses and more essentially of the sexual variety. As I shall labor to show that neurosis is the condition throughout our list of sexual diseases, and that all the foregoing changes, excesses and defects, depending upon the sexual, are more or less influential in predisposing human beings to brain and spinal cord disease. No person, so well as the physician, will comprehend, after once meditating upon this theme, the necessity for thorough study and a more rational understanding of the sexual. Medical writers, with one or two exceptions, have only ventured now and then an isolated paragraph, and left the physician to draw his own conclusion. Among the aboriginal tribes, the sexual appetite is and has always been indulged _ad libitum_; not only in the natural manner, but in every conceivable way, without noticeable harm to the organs themselves, or to the nervous system. In a lesser degree this is true of slaves, sailors and peasantry, and the lower orders of civilization. Sexual endurance diminishes in proportion to the advancement in civilization and intellectual culture. A long-cultured family can not sustain, in sexual indulgence, what to the uncivilized would be a matter of indifference.