I now found ready teachers right and left of me.  One of my schoolfellows invited me to watch; him in the process of masturbation; the spectacle left me quite unmoved; the result appeared to me far less exciting than the discharge of urine which, until then, I had associated with male virility.  I was so accustomed to my own lone amorous broodings that the effort and action required for this process, when I attempted to imitate it, disconcerted my thoughts and interfered with concentration on my own inventions.  I had never experienced the pleasure accompanying the spasm of emission, and there seemed to be nothing worth trying for along that road.  I desisted and returned to my reveries.  I was now in a perfect maze of promiscuity; there must have been at least fifty people who attracted me at that time.  I developed a liking for imagining myself between two lovers, generally men who were physical contrasts.  It was my habit to analyze as minutely as possible those who attracted me.  To gain intimacy with what was below the surface I studied with attention their hands, the wrists where they disappeared (showing the hair of the forearm), and the neck; I estimated the comparative size of the generative organs, the formation of the thighs and buttocks, and thus constructed a presentment of the whole man.  The more vividly I could do this, the keener was the pleasure I was able to obtain from their contemplated embraces.

“Till now I had been absolutely untouched by any moral scruples.  I had the usual acquiescence in the religious beliefs in which I had been trained; it did not enter my head that there was any divine law, one way or the other, concerning the allurements of the imagination.  From my thirteenth year slight hints of uneasiness began to creep into my conscience.  I began perhaps to understand that the formulas of religion, to which I had listened all my life with as little attention as possible, had some meaning which now and then touched the circumstances of my own life.  I had not yet realized that my past foretold my future, and that women would be to me a repulsion instead of an attraction where things sexual were concerned.  I had the full conviction that one day I should be married; I had also some fear that as I grew to manhood I might succumb to the temptations of loose women.  I had an incipient revulsion from such a fate, and this seemed to me to indicate that moral stirrings were at work within me.  One night I was amorously attacked in my bedroom by two of the domestics.  I experienced an acute horror which I hid under laughter; my resistance was so desperate that I escaped with a tickling.  I had been accustomed to sit on the servants’ knees, a habit I had innocently retained from childhood; I can now recall in detail the approaches these women had been used to make me.  At the time I was utterly oblivious that anything was intended.

“I was equally oblivious to things that had a nearer relation to my own feelings.