Dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play and of the motor needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor education. Schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological irritability and that it made animal life most vividly conscious of its existence and most exultant in ex- hibiting it. In very ancient times China ritualized it in the spring and made it a large part of the education of boys after the age of thirteen. Neale thinks it was originally circular or orbicular worship, which he deems oldest. In Japan, in the priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in Egypt, in the Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil advised it; St. Gregory introduced it into religious services. The early Christian bishops, called prassuls, led the sacred dance around the altar, and only in 692, and again in 161 7, was it forbidden in church. Neale and others have shown how the choral pro- cessionals with all the added charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in Christianizing many low tribes, 214 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE who could not understand the language of the church, than preaching. Savages are nearly all great dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own legends, with ritual sometimes so exact that error means death. The char- acter of people is often learned from their dances, and Moliere says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mysteries can only be revealed in them, as holy passion-plays. If we consider the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says that the polka so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot politics. The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still lives in the polo- naise. The gipsy dances have inspired a new school of music. The Greek drama grew out of the evolution of the tragic chorus. National dances like the hornpipe and reel of Scotland, the Reihen of Germany, the rondes of France, the Spanish tarantella and chaconne, the strathspey from the Spey Valley, the Irish jig, etc., express racial traits. Instead of the former vast repertory, the stately pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild salterrelle, the bourree with song and strong rhythm, the light and skippy bolero, the courtly bayadere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon and military dances; in place of the pristine power to express love, mourning, justice, penalty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service, symbolic and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we have in the dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at best but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad associations. This is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a work of rescue and revival is,8:reatly needed, for it is perhaps, not excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will, inoculating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other agencies have power to do. Right dancing can cadence the very soul, give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, pre- GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 215 dispose the heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue. That its present decadent forms, for those too devitahzed to dance aright, can be demorahzing, we know in this day too well, although even questionable dances may some- times work off vicious propensities in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find vent. Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another interesting chapter.
Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history of the race. One of the most marked dis- tinctions between savage and civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare, migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and manifest- ing remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less des- ultory in all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races is compared by Biicher ^ to that of training a cat to work when harnessed to a dogcart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the monotony of method that makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert. Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates are descended from a tidal ascidian (Descent of Man, i, p. 204 et seq.). There is indeed much that suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar and for males. This mode of life not only preceded the indus- trial and commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative existence. We see abundant traces of this ^ Arbeit, u. Rithmus. Leipzic. 1896.
2i6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE psychosis in the muscle habits of adolescents, and I think in stu- dent and particularly in college life, which can enforce regular- ity only to a limited extent. This is not reversion, but partly an expression of the nature and perhaps the needs of this stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of revolt against uni- formity imposed from without, which rob life of variety and ex- tinguish the spirit of adventure and untrammeled freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of civiliza- tion. The hunger for fatigue too can become a veritable pas- sion and is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for its own sake or the desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the utmost possible strength in crude ways is an erethic intoxication at a stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly growing fibers, cells, and or- gans which atrophy if not thus fed. When maturity is complete this need abates. If this be correct, the phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one factor in the inebriate's propensity, is an ontogenetic expression of a rhythm trait of a long racial period. Youth needs overexertion to compensate for underexertion, to undersleep to offset oversleep at times. This seems to be nature's provision to expand in all directions its possibilities of the body and soul in this plastic period when without this occasional excess powers would atrophy or suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities would not be realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent periods. This is treated more fully elsewhere.
Perhaps next to dancing in phyletic motivation comes per- sonal conflicts, such as wrestling, fighting, boxing, dueling, and in some sense, hunting. The animal world is full of struggle for survival, and primitive warfare is a wager of battle, of personal combat of foes contesting eye to eye and hand to hand, where victory of one is the defeat and perhaps death of the other, and where life is often staked against life. In its more brutal forms we see one of the most degrading of all the aspects of human nature. Burk ^ has shown how the most bestial of these instincts survive and crop out irresistibly in boyhood, 1 Teasing and Bullying. Ped. Sem., 1896, p. 336.
GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 21?
where fights are often with desperate abandon. Noses are bitten, ears torn, sensitive places kicked, hair pulled, arms twisted, the head stamped on and pounded on stones, fingers twisted, and hoodlums sometimes deliberately try to strangle, gouge out an eye, pull off an ear, pull out the tongue, break teeth, nose, or bones, or dislocate jaws or other joints, wring the neck, bite off a lip, and torture in utterly nameless ways. In unrestrained anger, man becomes a demon in love with the blood of his victim. The face is distorted, and there are yells, oaths, animal snorts and grunts, cries, and then exultant laughter at pain, and each is bruised, dirty, disheveled and pant- ing with exhaustion. For coarser natures, the spectacle of such conflicts has an intense attraction, while some morbid souls are scarred by a distinct phobia for everything suggestive of even lower degrees of opposition. These instincts, more or less developed in boyhood, are repressed in normal cases before strength and skill are sufficiently developed to inflict serious bodily injury, while without the reductives that orthogenetic growth brings they become criminal. Repulsive as are these grosser and animal manifestations of anger, its impulsion can not and should not be eliminated, but its expression transformed and directed toward evils that need all its antagonism. To be angry aright is a good part of moral education, and non- resistance under all provocations is unmanly, craven, and cowardly.^ An able-bodied young man, who can not fight physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is generally a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak. He lacks virility, his masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the core. Hence, instead of eradicating this in- stinct, one of the great problems of physical and moral ped- agogy is to rightly temper and direct it.
Sparta sedulously cultivated it in boys and in the great English schools, where for generations it has been more or less tacitly recognized, it is regulated by custom, and their literature and traditions abound in illustrations of its man-makingf and often transforming influence in ways well appreciated by Hughes and Arnold. It makes against degeneration, the essen- tial feature of which is weakening of will and loss of honor. Real virtue requires enemies, and women and effeminate and * See my Study of Anger. American Journal of Psychology, vol. x, 1899.
2l8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE old men want placid, comfortable peace, while a real man re- joices in noble strife which sanctifies all great causes, casts out fear, and is the chief school of courage. Bad as is overpug- nacity, a scrapping boy is better than one who funks a fight, and I have no patience with the sentimentality that w^ould here pour out the child with the bath, but would have every healthy boy taught boxing at adolescence if not before. The prize-ring is degrading and brutal, but in lieu of bet- ter illustrations of the spirit of personal contest I would in- terest a certain class of boys in it and try to devise modes of pedagogic utilization of the immense store of interest it gener- ates. Like dancing, it should be rescued from its evil associa- tions and its educational force put to do moral work, even though it be by way of individual prescriptions for specific de- fects of character. At its best, it is indeed a manly art, a superb school for quickness of eye and hand, decision, force of will, and self-control. The moment this is lost stinging punish- ment follows. Hence it is the surest of all cures for excessive irascibility and has been found to have a most beneficent effect upon a peevish or unmanly disposition. It has no mean theoretic side of rules, kinds of blow and counters, arts of drawing out and tiring an opponent, hindering but not injuring him, defensive and offensive tactics, etc., and it addresses chiefly the fundamental muscles in both training and conflict. I do not underestimate the many and great difficulties of proper pur- gation, but I know from both personal practise and observation that they are not unconquerable.
This form of personal conflict is better than dueling even in its comparatively harmless German student form, although this has been warmly defended by Jacob Grimm, Bismarck, and Treitschke, while Paulsen, Professor of Ethics, and Schrempf, of Theology, have pronounced it but a slight evil, and several Americans have thought it better 'than hazing, which it makes impossible. The dark side of dueling is seen in the hyper- trophied sense of honor which under the code of the corps becomes an intricate and fantastic thing, prompting, accord- ing to Ziegler,* a club of sixteen students to fight over two hundred duels in four wrecks in Jena early in this century.
^ Das Deutsche Student, 1895, p. 88. See also H. D. Sheldon: History and Pedagogy of American Student Societies, N. Y., 1901, p. 31 et seq.
GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 219 It is prone to degenerate to an artificial etiquette demanding satisfaction for slight and unintended offenses. Although this professor, who had his own face scarred on the mensur, pleaded for a student court of honor, with power to brand acts as in- famous and even to expel students, on the ground that honor had grown more inward, the traditions in favor of dueling were too strong. The duel had a religious romantic origin as reveal- ing God's judgment, and means that the victim of an insult is ready to stake body, or even life, and this is still its ideal side. Anachronism as it now is and degenerating readily to sport or spectacle, overpunishing what is often mere awkwardness or ignorance, it still impresses a certain sense of responsibility for conduct and gives some physical training, slight and specialized though it be. The code is conventional, drawn directly from old French military life, and is not true to the line that separates real honor from dishonor, deliberate insult that wounds normal self-respect from injury fancied by oversensitiveness or feigned by arrogance; so that in its present form it is not the best safe- guard of the sacred shrine of personality against invasion of its rights. If, as is claimed, it is some diversion from or fortification against corrosive sensuality, it has generally allied itself with excessive beer-drinking. Fencing, while an art suscep- tible of high development and valuable for both pose and poise and requiring great quickness of eye, arm, and wrist, is uni- lateral and robbed of the zest of inflicting real pain on an antagonist.
Bushido^ which means military-knightly ways, designates the Japanese conception of honor in behavior and in fighting. The youth is inspired by the ideal of Tom Brown " to leave behind him the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one." It expresses the race ideal of justice, patriotism, and the duty of living aright and dying nobly. It means also sympathy, pity, and love, for only the bravest can be the tenderest, and those most in love are most daring, and it includes politeness and the art of poetry. Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the hiishi is truth- ful without an oath. At the tender age of five the samurai is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsi- ^ Bushido: The Soul of Japan. An exposition of Japanese thought, by Inazo Nitob6. Philadelphia, 1900.
220 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE bility. At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given him, which must be his companions for Hfe. They were made by a smith whose shop is a sanctuary and who be- gins his work with prayer. They have the finest hihs and scab- bards, and are besung as invested with a charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they must never be drawn lightly. He is taught fencing, archery, horsemanship, tactics, the spear, ethics and literature, anatomy, for offense and defense; he must be indifferent to money, hold his life cheap be- side honor, and die if it is gone. This chivalry is called the soul of Japan, and if it fades life is vulgarized. It is a code of ethics and physical training.
Wrestling is a form of personal encounter which in an- tiquity reached a high development, and which, although now* more known and practised as athletics of the body than of the soul, has certain special disciplinary capacities in its various forms. It represents the most primitive type of the struggle of unarmed and unprotected man with man. Purged of its barbarities, and in its Greco-Roman form and properly subject to rules, it cultivates more kinds of movements than any other form — for limbs, trunk, neck, hand, foot, and all in the upright and in every prone position. It, too, has its manual of feints, holds, tricks, and specialties, and calls out wariness, quickness, strength, and shiftiness. Victory need involve no cruelty or even pain to the vanquished. The very closeness of body to body, emphasizing flexor rather than extensor arm muscles, imparts to it a peculiar tone, gives it a vast variety of possible activities, developing many alternatives at every stage, and tempts to many undiscovered forms of permanent mayhem. Its struggle is usually longer and less interrupted by pauses than pugilism, and its situations and conclusions often develop slowly, so that all in all, its character among contests is unique. As a school of posture for art, its varieties are extremely manifold and by no means developed, for it contains every kind of emphasis of every part and calls out every muscle group and at- titude of the human body; hence its training is most generic and least specialized, and victories have been w^on by very many kinds of excellence.
Perhaps nothing is more opposed to the idea of a gentle- man than the sceva animi tempestas of anger. A testy, quarrel- GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 22 1 some, mucky humor is antisocial, and an outburst of rage is repulsive. Even non-resistance, turning the other cheek, has its victories and may be a method of moral combat. A strong temper well controlled and kept in leash makes a kinetic char- acter; but in view of bullying, unfair play, cruel injustice to the weak and defenseless, of outrageous wrong that the law can not reach, patience and forbearance may cease to be virtues and summary redress may have a distinct advantage to the ethical nature of man and to social order, and the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby. If too repressed, righteous indignation may turn to sourness and sulks, and the disposition be spoiled. Hence the relief and exhilaration of an outbreak that often clears the psychic atmosphere like a thunder- storm, and gives the peace that passes understanding so often dilated on by our correspondents. Rather than the abject fear of making enemies whatever the provocation, I would praise those whose best title of honor is the kind of enemies they make. Better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even the sacrifice of an occasional life of our best academic youth than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alter- native.
So closely are love and war connected that not only is indi- vidual pugnacity greatly increased at the period of sexual ma- turity, when animals acquire or develop horns, fangs, claws, spurs, and weapons of offense and defense, but a new spirit of organization arises which makes teams possible or more perma- net. Football, baseball, cricket, etc., and even boating can be- come schools of mental and moral training. First, the rules of the game are often intricate, and to master and observe them ef- fectively is no mean training for the mind in controlling the body. These are steadily being revised and improved, and the reasons for each detail of inner construction and conduct of the game require experience and insight into human nature. Then the subordination of each member to the whole and to a leader cultivates the social and cooperative instincts, while the honor of the school, college, or city, which each team represents, is confided to each and all. Group loyalty in Anglo-Saxon games, which shows such a marked increment in coordination and self- 222 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE subordination at the dawn of puberty as to constitute a distinct change in the character of sports at this age, can be so utihzed as to develop a spirit of service and devotion not only to town, country, and race, but to God and the Church. Self must be merged and a sportsmanlike spirit cultivated that prefers defeat to tricks and secret practise, and a clean game to the applause of rooters and fans, intent only on victory, however won. The long, hard, fight against professionalism that brings in husky muckers, who by every rule of true courtesy and chivalry be- long outside academic circles, scrapping and underhand advan- tages, is a sad comment on the character and spirit of these games, and eliminates the best of their educational advantages. The necessity of intervention, which has imposed such great burdens on faculties and brought so much friction with the frenzy of scholastic sentiment in the hot stage of seasonal en- thusiasms, when fanned to a white heat by the excessive interest of friends and patrons and the injurious exploitation of the press, bears sad testimony to the strength and persistence of warlike instincts from our heredity. But even thus the good far predominates. The elective system has destroyed the class games, and our institutions have no units like the English col- leges to be pitted against each other, and so, as colleges grow, an ever smaller percentage of students obtain the benefit of practise on the teams, while electioneering methods often place second best men in place of the best. But both students and teachers are slowly learning wisdom in the dear school of experience. On the whole, there is less license in " breaking training " and in celebrating victories, and even at their worst, good probably predominates while the progress of recent years bids us hope. Finally, military ideals and methods of psycho-physical edu- cation are helpful regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more wholesome and robust than those which are merely esthetic. Marching in step gives proper and uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of body, the manual of arms, with evolution and involution of figures in the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of membership, and involves care of personal appearance and accouterments, while the uniform levels social distinction in dress. For the French and Italian and especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the two or three years of compulsory military service