Adolescence; its psychology and its relation to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education

Preface

This book is based on the author's Psychology, now in preparation, which should logically have been published first. The standpoint of the latter is roughly and provisionally indicated in Chapter X, with which it is hoped any reader with philosophic interests will begin. This point of view is further set forth in the last part of Chapter XVI, and some of its implications appear in Chapter XII, which should follow. That, recognizing fully all that has hitherto been done in this direction, the genetic ideas of the soul which pervade this work are new in both matter and method, and that if true they mark an extension of evolution into the psychic field of the utmost importance, is the conviction of the author. Although most of even his ablest philosophical contemporaries, both American and European, must regard all such conceptions much as Agassiz did Darwinism, he believes that they open up the only possible line of advance for psychic studies, if they are ever to escape from their present dishonorable capitivity to epistemology, which has to-day all the aridity, unprogressiveness, and barrenness of Greek sophism and medieval scholasticism, without standing, as did these, in vital relations to the problems of their age.

Idealism, metaphysics, and religion spring from basal needs of the human soul, and are indispensable in some form to every sound and comprehensive view of it, as well as necessary to a complete science. But these are now volatilized for both theory and practise by the present lust for theories of the nature of knowledge, which have become a veritable and multiform psychosis. To a psychology broad enough to include all the philosophic disciplines, this extravasation of thought, especially in a practical land like ours, presents a challenging problem. In academic isolation .irom the throbbing life of the great world, with but faint interest in or vi THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE

acquaintance with nature, afield or even in the laboratory, in habitual communion with the second-hand sources of knowledge found in books, in the solitude of the study, the sedentary and mentally pampered thinker has lost reality and devotes himself to a passionate quest of it as if it were a Golden Fleece or a Holy Grail to be rediscovered or a sacred sepulcher to be won from the paynim scientists. With little experience in willing and far less with the floods of feeling that have irrigated the life of the man in the past, the " experience " of the adult consciousness he so persistently analyzes is at best but a provincial oracle of the soul which is incalculably older, vaster, or more organized than it. These searchers still think in a pre-evolutionary age, and if they do not have recourse to pure apriorism or creationism are peculiarly prone to lapse to some savage type of thought like spiritism, telepathy, or transmundane irruption, and their interest in the soul is both impelled and guided by the imperious question of its survival after death, which is not, and probably never can be, a problem of science. It is they who have given us a bankrupt psychology without a soul. Beginning with Berkeley's ephebic dreamery about the existence of the external world, and Hume's satirical and not very sincere corollary of negation of the self, which Kant took in grim German earnest, they re-edit the latter with countless variants to find new patent ways out of an agnosticism that belongs, if anywhere, more to senescence than to adolescence. Just as infancy and senility have a certain correspondence, as does each stage of individual evolution and devolution, and as youth needs to anticipate the problems of old age and even of death, so the young need to feel by anticipation the great problems of reality, but not so seriously as to endanger losing their souls and the world which is so much easier to teach than how to find them again. Just as it is only a crippled belief in God that rests on theological arguments for his being, so at the age when the whole heart of youth goes out to reality, it is only those made prematurely old by the pedagogy of doubt that need the cheap, artificial confirmation of epistemology in order to face life with resolution and enthusiasm. The studies of the mind need new contact with life at as many points as possible. The psychic activities of

PREFACE vii

childhood and youth and of the common average man, often the horror of previous philosophy and the actually as distinct from the theoretically practical, are worthy of all scientific honor.

While inanimate nature and even the lower forms of animal life are relatively stable, some of the latter having persisted from remote geologic ages, man is rapidly changing. His presence on the globe, his dominion over animals, his diffusion, and the historic period, are a series of increasingly recent events. While his bodily form is comparatively stable, his soul is in a transition stage, and all that we call progress is more and more rapid. Old moorings are constantly broken ; adaptive plasticity to new environments — somatic, economic, industrial, social, moral and religious — was never so great ; and in the changes which we hope are on the whole truly progressive, more and more human traits are too partially acquired to be permanently inherited. All this suggests that man is not a permanent type but an organism in a very active stage of evolution toward a more permanent form. Our consciousness is but a single stage and one type of mind : a late, partial, and perhaps essentially abnormal and remedial outcrop of the great underlying life of man-soul. The animal, savage, and child-soul can never be studied by introspection. Moreover, with missing links and extinct ethnic types, much, perhaps most, soul life has been hopelessly lost. Thus, the adult who seeks self-knowledge by introversion is banausic, and his system is at its best but one human document or return to the eternal but ever unanswered question what man can know, what he should do, and how he most truly feels. From this it follows that we must turn to the larger and far more laborious method of observation, description, and induction. We must collect states of mind, sentiments, phenomena long since lapsed, psychic facts that appear faintly and perhaps but once in a lifetime, and that in only few and rare individuals, impulses that, it may be, never anywhere arise above the threshold, but manifest themselves only in automatisms, acts, behavior, things neglected, trivial and incidental, such as Darwin says are often most vital. We must go to school to the folk-soul, learn of criminals and defectives, animals, and in some sense go back to Aristotle l* viii THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE

in rebasing psychology on biology, and realize that we know the soul best when we can best write its history in the world, and that there are no finalities save formulse of development. The soul is thus still in the making, and we may hope for an indefinite further development. Perhaps other racial stocks than ours will later advance the kingdom of man as far beyond our present standpoint as it now is above that of the lowest savage or even animals. There are powers in the soul that slumber like the sleepers in myth, partially aroused, it may be, in great personal or social crises, but sometime to be awakened to dominance. In a word, the view here represents a nascent tendency and is in striking contrast to all those systems that presume to have attained even an approximate finality. But the twilight is that of dawn and not of evening. It is the morning hours of beginning and not that of completing the day of work, and this can appeal only to those still adolescent in soul.

Holding that the child and the race are each keys to the other, I have constantly suggested phyletic explanations of all degrees of probability. Some of these, I think, have been demonstrated so far as is now possible in this obscure and complicated domain. Realizing the limitations and qualifications of the recapitulation theory in the biologic field, I am now convinced that its psychogenetic applications have a method of their own, and although the time has not yet come when any formulation of these can have much value, I have done the best I could with each instance as it arose. Along with the sense of the immense importance of further coordinating childhood and youth with the development of the race, has grown the conviction that only here can we hope to find true norms against the tendencies to precocity in home, school, church, and civilization generally, and also to establish criteria by which to both diagnose and measure arrest and retardation in the individual and the race. While individuals differ widely in not only the age but the sequence of the stages of repetition of racial history, a knowledge of nascent stages and the aggregate interests of different ages of life is the best safeguard against very many of the prevalent errors of education and of life.

Modern conceptions, which increasingly make all mental

PREFACE ix

processes efferent in their psychophysical nature, suggest a now impending synthesis that may give to our practical age and land the long-hoped-for and long-delayed science of man. To help bring these tendencies to their maturity is the task to which organic thinkers should address themselves. Utilizing to the utmost the lessons of the past, they should free themselves alike from excessive subjectivisms and from the limitations of old systems and methods, and feel it their highest duty to enter upon the less critical and more constructive work of building larger philosophic mansions for the soul. If truth is edification, the highest criterion of pure science is its educative value. The largest possible aspect of all the facts of life and mind is educational, and the only complete history is the story of the influences that have advanced or retarded the development of man toward his completion, always ideal and forever in the future. Thus psychology and the higher pedagogy are one and inseparable. Not only the beautiful and the good, but the true, can have no other test of validity than that they appeal to and satisfy certain deep needs; and these are many. From this general view-point I have tried to show how truth about things of the soul, in an unique sense, is never complete or certain till it has been applied to education, and that the latter field is itself preeminent and unlike all other fields of application for either scientific or philosophic conclusions.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute an unique period of human life. The acute stage of teething is passing, the brain has acquired nearly its adult size and weight, health is almost at its best, activity is greater and more varied than ever before or than it ever will be again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality, and resistance to fatigue. The child develops a life of its own outside the home circle, and its natural interests are never so independent of adult influence. Perception is very acute, and there is great immunity to exposure, danger, accident, as well as to temptation. Reason, true morality, religion, sympathy, love, and esthetic enjoyment are but very slightly developed. Everything, in short, suggests the culmination of one stage of life as if it thus represented what was once, and for a very protracted and relatively stationary period, the age of maturity in some remote, perhaps x THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE

pigmoid, stage of human evolution, when in a warm climate the young of our species once shifted for themselves independently of further parental aid. The qualities now developed are phyletically vastly older than all the neo-atavistic traits of body and soul, later to be superposed like a new and higher story built on to our primal nature. Heredity is so far both more stable and more secure. The elements of personality are few, but are well organized and on a simple, effective plan. The momentum of the paleopsychic traits is great, and they are often clearly distinguishable from those to be later added. Thus the boy is father of the man in a new sense in that his qualities are indefinitely older and existed well compacted untold ages before the more distinctly human attributes were developed. Indeed, there are a few faint indications set forth in the text of a yet earlier age nodality or meristic segmentation, as if amid the increased instabilities of health at the age of about six we could still detect the ripple-marks of an ancient pubic beach now lifted high above the tides of a receding shore-line as human infancy has been prolonged. I have also given reasons that lead me to the conclusion that, despite its dominance, the function of sexual maturity and procreative power is peculiarly mobile up and down the ageline independently of many of the qualities usually so closely associated with it, so that much that sex created in the phylum now precedes it in the individual.

Rousseau would leave prepubescent years to nature and to these primal hereditary impulsions and allow the fundamental traits of savagery their fling till twelve. Biological psychology finds many and cogent reasons to confirm this view if only a proper environment could be provided. The child revels in savagery, and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best modern school can provide. Rudimentary organs of the soul now suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune to them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis for which

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I have tried to suggest a far broader application than the Stagirite could see in his day.

These nativistic and more or less feral instincts can and should be fed and formed. The deep and strong cravings in the individual to revive the ancestral experiences and occupations of the race can and must be met, at least in a secondary and vicarious way, by tales of the heroic virtues the child can appreciate, and these proxy experiences should make up by variety and extent what they lack in intensity. The teacher art should so vivify all that the resources of literature, tradition, history, can supply which represents the crude, rank virtues of the world's childhood that, with his almost visual imagination, reenforced by psychonomic recapitulatory impulses, the child can enter upon his full heritage, live out each stage of his life to the fullest, and realize in himself all its manifold tendencies. Echoes only of the vaster, richer life of the remote past of the race they must remain, but just these are the murmurings of the only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity. Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. But we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite to visit field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, the true homes of childhood in this wild, undomesticated stage from which modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him. Books and reading are distasteful, for the very soul and body cry out for a more active, objective life, and to know nature and man at first hand. These two staples, stories and nature, by these informal methods of the home and the environment constitute fundamental education.

But now another remove from nature seems to be made necessary by the manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilization. We should transplant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect lighting, ventilation, temperature. We must shut out nature and open books. The child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny musxii THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE

cles that wag the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which constitute nearly half its weight, decay. Even if it be prematurely, he must be subjected to special disciplines and be apprenticed to the higher qualities of adulthood, for he is not only a product of nature, but a candidate for a highly developed humanity. To many, if not most, of the influences here there can be at first but little inner response. Insight, understanding, interest, sentiment, are for the most part only nascent, and most that pertains to the true kingdom of mature manhood is embryonic. The wisest requirements seem to the child more or less alien, arbitrary, heteronomous, artificial, falsetto. There is much passivity, often active resistance and evasion, and perhaps spasms of obstinacy, to it all. But the senses are keen and alert, reactions immediate and vigorous, and the memory is quick, sure, and lasting, and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding. Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training. Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign tongues and their pronunciation, the manipulation of numbers and of geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden hour, and if it passes unimproved, all these can never be acquired later without a heavy handicap of disadvantage and loss. These necessities may be hard for the health of body, sense, mind, as well as for morals, and pedagogic art consists in breaking the child into them betimes as intensively and as quickly as possible with minimal strain and with the least amount of explanation or coquetting for natural interest and in calling medicine confectionery. This is not teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and regimentation. The method should be mechanical, repetitive, authoritative, dogmatic. The automatic powers are now at their very apex, and they can do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows or dreams of. Here we have something to learn from the schoolmasters of the past back to the middle ages, and even from the ancients. The greatest stress, with short periods and few hours, incessant insistence, incitement, and little reliance upon inter-

PREFACE xui

est, reason, or work done without the presence of the teacher, should be the guiding principles for pressure in these essentially formal and, to the child, contentless elements of knowledge. These should be sharply distinguished from the indigenous, evoking, and more truly educational factors described in the last paragraph, which are meaty, content-full, and relatively formless as to time of day, method, spirit, and perhaps environment and personnel of teacher, and possibly somewhat in season of the year, almost as sharply as work differs from play, or perhaps as the virility of man that loves to command a phalanx, be a martinet and drill-master, differs from femininity which excels in persuasion, sympathetic insight, story-telling, and in the tact that discerns and utilizes spontaneous interests in the young.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born. The qualities of body and soul that now emerge are far newer. The child comes from and harks back to a remoter past; the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of the race slowly become prepotent. Development is less gradual and more saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress when old moorings were broken and a higher level attained. The annual rate of growth in height, weight, and strength is increased and often doubled, and even more. Important functions previously non-existent arise. Growth of parts and organs loses its former proportions, some permanently and some for a season. Some of these are still growing in old age and others are soon arrested and atrophy. The old moduli of dimensions become obsolete and old harmonies are broken. The range of individual differences and average errors in all physical measurements and all psychic tests increases. Some linger long in the childish stage and advance late or slowly, while others push on with a sudden outburst of impulsion to early maturity. Bones and muscles lead all other tissues, as if they vied with each other, and there is frequent flabbiness or tension as one or the other leads. Nature arms youth for conflict with all the resources at her command — speed, power of shoulder, biceps, back, leg, jaw, — strengthens and enlarges skull, thorax, hips, makes man aggressive and prepares woman's frame for maternity. The xiv THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE

power of the diseases peculiar to childhood abates, and liability to the far more diseases of maturity begins, so that with liability to both it is not strange that the dawn of the ephebic day is marked at the same time by increased morbidity but diminished rates of mortality. Some disorders of arrest and defect as well as of excessive unfoldment in some function, part, or organ may now, after long study and controversy, be said to be established as peculiar to this period, and diseases that are distinctly school- and city-bred abound, with apparently increasing frequency. The momentum of heredity often seems insufficient to enable the child to achieve this great revolution and come to complete maturity, so that every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals. There is not only arrest, but perversion, at every stage, and hoodlumism, juvenile crime, and secret vice seem not only increasing, but develop in earlier years in every civilized land. Modern life is hard, and in many respects increasingly so, on youth. Home, school, church, fail to recognize its nature and needs and, perhaps most of all, its perils. The cohesions between the elements of personality are loosened by the disparities of both somatic and psychic development, and if there is arrest at any stage or in any part before the higher unity is achieved there is almost sure to be degeneration and reunion on a lower level than before. One of the gravest dangers is the persistent ignoring by femininists of the prime importance of establishing normal periodicity in girls, to the needs of which everything else should for a few years be secondary.

The functions of every sense undergo reconstruction, and their relations to other psychic functions change, and new sensations, some of them very intense, arise, and new associations in the sense sphere are formed. Haptic impressions, appetite for food and drink, and smell are most modified. The voice changes, vascular instability, blushing, and flushing are increased. Sex asserts its mastery in field after field, and works its havoc in the form of secret vice, debauch, disease, and enfeebled heredity, cadences the soul to both its normal and abnormal rhythms, and sends many thousand youth a year to quacks, because neither parents, teachers, preachers, or physicians know how to deal with its problems. Thus the

PREFACE xv

foundations of domestic, social, and religious life are oftenest undermined. Between religion and love God and nature have wrought an indissoluble bond so that neither can attain normality without that of the other. Secondary sexual qualities are shown to have an ever-widening range, and parenthood to mean more with every upward step of development. The youth craves more knowledge of body and mind, that can help against besetting temptations, aid in the choice of a profession, and if his intellect is normal he does not vex his soul overmuch about the logical character of the universe or the ultimate sanction of either truth or virtue. He is more objective than subjective, and only if his lust to know nature and life is starved does his mind trouble him by in-growing. There are new repulsions felt toward home and school, and truancy and runaways abound. The social instincts undergo sudden unfoldment and the new life of love awakens. It is the age of sentiment and of religion, of rapid fluctuation of mood, and the world seems strange and new. Interest in adult life and in vocations develops. Youth awakes to a new world and understands neither it nor himself. The whole future of life depends on how the new powers now given suddenly and in profusion are husbanded and directed. Character and personality are taking form, but everything is plastic. Self-feeling and ambition are increased, and every trait and faculty is liable to exaggeration and excess. It is ail a marvelous new birth, and those who believe that nothing is so worthy of love, reverence, and service as the body and soul of youth, and who hold that the best test of every human institution is how much it contributes to bring youth to the ever fullest possible development, may well review themselves and the civilization in which we live to see how far it satisfies this supreme test.

Never has youth been exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and day. Increasing urban life with its temptations, prematurities, sedentary occupations, and passive stimuli just when an active, objective life is most needed, early emancipation and a lessening sense for both duty and discipline, the haste to know and do all befitting man's estate before its time, the mad rush for sudden wealth and the reckless fashions set by its gilded youth — all these xvi THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE

lack some of the regulatives they still have in older lands with more conservative traditions. In a very pregnant psychological sense ours is an unhistoric land. Our very Constitution had a Minerva birth, and was not the slow growth of precedent. Our ideas of freedom were at the outset fevered by the convulsion of the French Revolution. Our literature, customs, fashions, institutions, and legislation were inherited or copied, and our religion was not a gradual indigenous growth, but both its spirit and forms were imported ready-made from Holland, Rome, England, and Palestine. To this extent we are a fiat nation, and in a very significant sense we have had neither childhood nor youth, but have lost touch with these stages of life because we lack a normal development history. It is not merely that we have no antiquity rich in material and spiritual monuments that is the best nursery of patriotism in the young, but our gallery of heroes is largely composed, not of glorious youth but of sages advanced in age or old in wisdom for their years. Our immigrants have often passed the best years of youth or leave it behind when they reach our shores, and their memories of it are in other lands. No country is so precociously old for its years. Few as these are, the senescence of the original American stock is already seen in abandoned farms and the infecundity of graduates, so that if our population had been unreplenished from abroad for the last century we should be to-day not merely stationary, like France, but retrogressive. In this environment our young people leap rather than grow into maturity. Our storm and stress strenuousness too often imparts at least the narrow nervous intensity of an individuation that is biologically antagonistic to genesis and that is less ephebic, as we fondly think it to be, than ephebeitic. We are conquering nature, achieving a magnificent material civilization, leading the world in the applications though not in the creation of science, coming to lead in energy and intense industrial and other activities ; our vast and complex business organization that has long since outgrown the comprehension of professional economists, absorbs ever more and earlier the best talent and muscle of youth and now dominates health, time, society, politics, and lawgiving, and sets new and ever more pervading fashions in manners, morals, education, and religion; but we are pro-

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gressively forgetting that for the complete apprenticeship to life, youth needs repose, leisure, art, legends, romance, idealization, and in a word humanism, if it is to enter the kingdom of man well equipped for man's highest work in the world. In education our very kindergartens, which outnumber those of any other land, by dogma and hyper-sophistication tend to exterminate the naive that is the glory of childhood. Everywhere the mechanical and formal triumph over content and substance, the letter over the spirit, the intellect over morals, lesson setting and hearing over real teaching, the technical over the essential, information over education, marks over edification, and method over matter. We coquet with children's likes and dislikes and can not teach duty or the spirit of obedience. In no civilized land is teaching so unprofessional or school boards at such a low level of incompetence. Nowhere are the great traditions of the race so neglected, the high school so oblivious of either the nature or the needs, or both, of the adolescent stage of life. The American college is half universitized with methods and matter prematurely specialized, and half bound to the recitation, marking methods and discipline of the school, while the apex of our educational system is still in Europe, where hundreds of our best graduates go yearly to find the advanced and special training we are still, in most departments, unable to supply.

In religion, which was grafted from an alien ethnic stock, we lack scientific sincerity. Statistics show more sects and more clergymen per capita of population than in any other land, and a rapidly progressive ignorance by the rising generation of the very Bible we profess to revere. Churches, charities, missions abound, but our slums are putrefying sores whose denizens anthropologists believe lower in the moral and intellectual scale than any known race of savages, and the percentages of juvenile crimes and the average age of first commitment grows steadily earlier. We have vastly simplified politics by separating Church and State and by our voluntary system, but we have also permitted a chasm to yawn between our secular and religious life, between science and theology, till even seminaries for the training of clergymen neglect and even suspect the study of nature as if God were a hypocrite and did one thing in his works and said another in his Word, when xviii THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE m