lessons you try to escape by one means and another, and those various satisfactions of lust which attract you on all sides and are accessible to you. Such a position appears to you quite natural, and it cannot appear otherwise; an you are not at all to blame that it does so appear, because you have grown up in it, and your comrades are similarly placed; -and yet this position is nevertheless quite abnormal and most dangerous. It is most dangerous because if one places the whole object of one's life in such satisfactions, which is the case with young men, whose lusts are new and particularly strong, then, according to the well-known and inviolable law, it will necessarily happen that in order to experience the pleasure to which one has become accustomed, from rich foods, driving, games, clothes, music, one will have to keep adding objects of such lusts, because the same pleasure is not derived on the second and third occasions, after the first satisfaction, and one has to invent new and more exciting forms. (There even exists a law according to which it has been ascertained that pleasure increases in arithmetical progression, whereas the means for producing pleasure must be increased in geometrical progression.) And as of all lusts the sexual one is the most painful, expressing itself in "falling in love," caresses, self abuse, or the procreative act, one very soon reaches the latter. And then begins the artificial increase of these pleasures by wine, tobacco, sensuous music, when one can no longer substitute something newer and more exciting for them. This course is so usual that it is followed by most young men, rich and poor (with some few exceptions); if they pull up in time they enter true life more and less injured; if not, they perish altogether, as hundreds of young men have perished before my eyes.
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