especially Ufer, Triiper and the contributors to their journal devoted to the faults of children to really develop here a center of great interest. Striimpell found 314 faults mentioned and realized that " crimes are faults writ large and idiocy is but the extreme of dulness." Siegert ^ groups children of prob- lematical nature into the following sixteen classes: the sad, the extremely good or bad, star-gazers, scatter-brains, apathetic, misanthropic, doubters and investigators, reverent, critical, ex- ecutive, stupid and clownish, naive, funny, anamnesic, disposed to learn, and blase; patience, foresight, and self-control, he thinks, are chiefly needed.
An unique and interesting study was undertaken by Kozle^ by collecting and studying thirty German writers on pedagog- ical subjects since Pestalozzi, and cataloguing all the words they use describing the faults of children. In all, this gave 914 faults, far more in number than their virtues. These were classified as native and of external origin, acute and chronic, egoistic and altruistic, greed, perverted honor, self- will, falsity, laziness, frivolity, distraction, precocity, timidity, envy and malevolence, ingratitude, quarrelsomeness, cruelty, superstition, and the latter fifteen were settled on as resultant groups, and the authors who describe them best are quoted.
Bohannon ^ on the basis of questionnaire returns classified peculiar children as heavy, tall, short, small, strong, weak, deft, agile, clumsy, beautiful, ugly, deformed, birthmarked, keen and precocious, defective in sense, mind, and speech, nervous, clean, dainty, dirty, orderly, obedient, disobedient, disorderly, teasing, buoyant, buffoon, cruel, selfish, generous, sympathetic, inquisi- tive, lying, ill-tempered, silent, dignified, frank, loquacious, courageous, timid, whining, spoiled, gluttonous, and only child.
Marro* tabulated the conduct of 3,012 boys in gymnasial and lyceal classes in Italy from eleven to eighteen years of age (see next page). Conduct was marked as good, bad, and in- different, according to the teacher's estimate, and was good at eighteen in 74 per cent of the cases; at eleven in 70 per cent; * Problematische Kindernaturen. Leipzig, 1889.
' Die padagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19 Jahrhunderts.
'Peculiar and Exceptional Children. Ped. Sem., Oct., 1896, vol. iv, pp. 3-6a * La Puberte. Tafala Graf. I, p. 52.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE at seventeen in 69 per cent; and at fourteen in only 58 per cent. In positively bad conduct, the age of fifteen led, thirteen and fourteen were but little better, v^hile it im- proved at sixteen, seven- teen, and eighteen. In general, conduct was good at eleven; declined at twelve and thirteen; sank to its worst at fourteen; and then im- proved in yearly incre- ments that did not dif- fer much, and at seven- teen was nearly as good as at eleven, and at eighteen four points better.
Quarrels and blows 53-90 Laziness, negligence 1.80 Untidiness lO. 70 Improper language 41 Indecent acts and words i.oo Refusal to work 82 Various offenses against discipline...19.00 Truancy 9.60 Plots to run away 1. 70 Running away 72 Girls.
.0 .0 .0 Mr. Sears ^ reports in percentages statistics of the punish- ments received by a thousand children for the following offenses: Disorder, 17^; disobedience, 16; carelessness, 13 J; running away, I2|; quarreling, 10; tardiness, 6f; rudeness, 6; fight- ing, 5 J; lying, 4; stealing, i; miscellaneous, j\. He names a long list of punishable offenses, such as malice, swearing, obscenity, bullying, lying, cheating, untidiness, insolence, in- sult, conspiracy, disobedience, obstinacy, rudeness, noisiness, ridicule; injury to books, building, or other property; and analyzes at length the kinds of punishment, modes of making it * Home and School Punishments. Ped. Sem., March, 1899, vol. vi, pp. 159- JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 347 fit the offense and the nature of the child, the discipline of consequences, lapse of time between the offense and its punish- ment, the principle of slight but sure tasks as penalties, etc.
Triplett ^ attempted a census of faults and defects named by the teacher. Here inattention by far led all others. Defects of sense and speech, carelessness, indifference, lack of honor and of self-restraint, laziness, dreamy listlessness, nervousness, men- tal incapacity, lack of consideration for others, vanity, affecta- tion, disobedience, untruthfulness, grumbling, etc., follow. Inattention to a degree that makes some children at the mercy of their environment and all its changes, and their mental life one perpetual distraction, is one which teachers, of course, nat- urally observe. Children's views of their own faults and those of other children lay a very different emphasis. Here fighting, bullying, and teasing lead all others; then come stealing, bad manners, lying, disobedience, truancy, cruelty to animals, un- tidiness, selfishness, etc. Parents' aspect of this subject Trip- lett found still different. Here wilfulness and obstinacy led all others with teasing, quarreling, dislike of application and effort, and many others following. The vast number of faults men- tioned contrasts very strikingly with the seven deadly sins.
In a suggestive statistical study on the relations of the conduct of children to the weather. Dexter ^ found that ex- cessive humidity w^as most productive of misdemeanors; that when the temperature was between 90 and 100 the probability of bad conduct was increased 300 per cent, when between 80 and 90 it was increased 104 per cent. Abnormal barometric pres- sure, whether great or small, was found to increase misconduct 50 per cent; abnormal movements of the wind increased it from 20 to 66 per cent; while the time of year and precipita- tion seemed to have almost no effect. While the effect of weather has been generally recognized by superintendents and teachers and directors of prisons and asylums, and even by banks, which in London do not permit clerks to do the more im- portant bookkeeping during very foggy days, the statistical estimates of its effect in general need larger numbers for more valuable determinations. Temperature is known to have a 1 A Study of the Faults of Children. Fed. Sem., June, 1903, p. 200 et seq. 'The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter. Fed. Sem., April, 1898 348 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE very distinct effect upon crime, especially suicide and truancy. Workmen do less in bad weather, blood pressure is modi- fied, etc.^ In his study of truancy, Kline ^ starts with the assump- tion that the maximum metabolism is always consciously or unconsciously sought, and that migrations are generally away from the extremes of hot and cold toward an optimum tempera- ture. The curve of truancies and runaways increases in a marked ratio at puberty, which probably represents the age of natural majority among primitive people. Dislike of school, the passion for out-of-door life, and more universal in- terests in man and nature now arise, so that runaways may be interpreted as an instinctive rebellion against limitations of freedom and unnatural methods of education as well as against poor homes. Hunger is one of its most potent, although often unconscious causes. The habitual environment now begins to seem dull and there is a great increase in impatience at re- straint. Sometimes there is a mania for simply going away and enjoying the liberty of nomadic life. Just as good people in foreign parts sometimes allow themselves unwonted liber- ties, so vagrancy increases crime. The passion to get to and play at or in the water is often strangely dominant. It seems so fine out of doors, especially in the spring, and the woods and fields make it so hard to voluntarily incarcerate oneself in the schoolroom, that pubescent boys and even girls often feel like animals in captivity. They long intensely for the utter aban- don of a wilder life, and very characteristic is the frequent dis- carding of foot and head dress and even garments in the blind instinct to realize again the conditions of primitive man. The manifestations of this impulse, if read aright, are grave arraign- ments of the lack of adaptability of the child's environment to his disposition and nature, and with home restraints once broken the liabilities to every crime, especially theft, are enormously increased. The truant, although according to Kline's measure- ments slightly smaller than the average child, is more energetic and is generally capable of the greatest activity and usefulness 1 Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J. S. Lemon. Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., ' Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L. W. Kline. Ped. Sem>, JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 349 in more out-of-door vocations. Truancy is augmented, too, just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical ex- ercise is denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis has made so interesting, is an arrested, degen- erate, or perverted being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier. It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives " elsewhere " a special charm. In the im- mediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but loco- motor; and the moment his life becomes migratory all the re- straints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman already developed. Adolescence is the normal time of emanci- pation from the parental roof, when youth seeks to set up a home of its own, but the apprentice to life must wander far and long enough to find the best habits in which to set up for him- self. This is the spring season of emigration, and it should be an indispensable part of every life curriculum, just before settle- ment, to travel far and wide, if resources and inclination per- mit. But this stage should end in wisely chosen settlement where the young life can be independently developed, and that with more complacency and satisfaction because the place has been wisely chosen on the basis of a wide comparison. The chronic vagrant has simply failed to develop the reductives of this normal stage.
Crime is cryptogamous and flourishes in concealment, so that falsehood not only facilitates but certain types of lies often cause and are caused by it. The beginning of wisdom in treat- ment is to discriminate between good and bad lies. My own study ^ of the lies of 300 normal children, by a method care- * Children's Lies. Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1890, vol. iii, pp. 59-70.
350 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE fully devised in order to avoid all indelicacy to the childish consciousness, suggested the following distinct species of lies. It is often a well-marked epoch when the young child first learns that it can imagine and state things that have no objec- tive counterpart in its life, and there is often a weird intoxi- cation when some absurd and monstrous statement is made, while the first sensation of a deliberate break with truth causes a real excitement which is often the birth pang of the imagi- nation. More commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm to self-deception. Children make be- lieve they are animals, doctors, ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear. Idealizing temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four to suddenly assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a cherry-tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely that they have had a new mental combination independently of ex- perience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualization and develops into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. The life of Hartley Cole- ridge, by his brother, is one of many illustrations. He fancied a cataract of what he named " jug-force " would burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this realm — all these developed in his imagination, where they ex- isted with great reality for years. The vividness of this fancy resembles the pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to say, let us play we are sisters, as if this made the relation more real. Cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt for training for his exhibition of phrenological impostures, illus- trating his thirty-five faculties. He lied when he confessed he had lied, said a young Sancho Panza, who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later admitted their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh, near puberty, after reading Roman history, JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 35 1 used to fancy himself the Emperor of Constantinople, and car- ried on the administration of the realm for hours at a time. His fancies never quite became convictions, but adolescence is the golden age of this kind of dreamery and reverie which supple- ments reality and totalizes our faculties, and often gives a special charm to dramatic activities and in morbid cases to simulation and dissimulation. It is a state from which some of the bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise. These are the noble lies of poetry, art, and idealism, but their pedagogic regimen must be wise.
Again with children as with savages, truth depends largely upon personal likes and dislikes. It is for friends, and lies are felt to be quite right for enemies. The young often see no wrong in lies their friends wish told, but may collapse and confess when asked if they would have told their mother thus. Boys best keep up complotted lies and are surer to own up if caught than girls. It is harder to cheat in school with a teacher who is liked. Friendships are cemented by confidences and secrets, and when they wane, promises not to tell weaken in their validity. Lies to the priest, and above all to God, are the worst. All this makes special attention to friendships, leaders, and favorites important, and suggests the high value of science for general veracity.
The worst lies, perhaps, are those of selfishness. They ease children over many hard places in life, and are convenient covers for weakness and vice. These lies are, on the whole, judging from our census, most prevalent. They are also most corrupting and hard to correct. All bad habits particularly predispose to the lie of concealment, for those who do wrong are almost certain to have recourse to falsehood, and the sense of meanness thus slowly bred, which may be met by appeals to honor, for so much of which school life is responsible, is often mitigated by the fact that falsehoods are frequently re- sorted to in moments of danger and excitement, are easily for- gotten when it is over, and rarely rankle. These, even more than the pseudomaniac cases mentioned later, grow rankly in those with criminal predispositions.
The lie heroic is often justified as a means of noble ends. Youth has an instinct which is wholesome for viewing moral situations as wholes. Callow casualists are fond of declaring 352 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE that it would be a duty to state that their mother was out when she was in, if it would save her life, although they perhaps would not lie to save their own. A doctor, many suggested, might tell an overanxious patient or friend that there was hope, saving his conscience perhaps by reflecting that there was hope, although they had it while he had none. The end at first in such cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often de- scribes such situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement from the monotonous and tedious obliga- tion of rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as a pri- vate tribunal is now apparent.
Many adolescents become craven literalists and distinctly morbid and pseudophobiac, regarding every deviation from scrupulously literal truth as alike heinous, and many system- atized palliatives and casuistic word-splitting, methods of whispering or silently interpolating the words " not," " per- haps," or " I think," sometimes said over hundreds of times to neutralize the guilt of intended or unintended falsehoods, appear in our records as a sad product of bad methods.
Next to the selfish lie for protection, and of special psy- chological interest for adolescent crime, is what we may call pseudomania, seen especially in pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed with selfishness and affectation and have a passion for always acting a part, attracting attention, etc. The recent literature of telepathy and hypnotism furnishes many striking examples of this diathesis of impostors of both sexes. It is a strange psychological paradox that some can so deliber- ately prefer to call black white and find distinct inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth and fact. The great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies, are cases in point. They find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of power which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of making truth a lie and by decreeing things into and out of existence.
Ferriani ^ personally studied 500 condemned juveniles with JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 353 reference to their lying habits, and found that their falsehoods were distributed in the following nine classes: 472 lied from instinct and weakness; 401 for self-defense; 360 vanity in getting the better of others; 231 imitation; 387 selfishness; 195 jealousy, envy, and revenge; 488 fancy; 370 laziness; 29 nobility of soul. Lies of fancy thus exceed all others, and those due to instinctive weakness and self -protection follow hard after. The lively mind of a child always sees the marvelous side of things, while weakness and fear always tempt to con- cealment in order to ward off blame or punishment.
Heinroth took the largest view of this subject in his mental pathology, when he conceived all diseases and sin a lie, be- cause it was a perversion of man's true nature, which in these was falsely expressed, while Nordau ^ finds a more sensational verisimilitude in enumerating the many conventionalities which modern society has devised in its many courtesies, customs, and transparent hypocrisies. The sense of truthfulness comes hard and late, and everything depends upon distinguishing the radi- cally different forms of falsehood and applying the remedy fit for each. Robust truth-speaking, which scorns pretense, false beliefs, fears, shames, and hopes, will never act a part or fill a place in life for which one's nature is not fitted; which finds none of the titillation that neurotic constitutions derive from mendacity; which instinctively shuns extravagance, even in the use of superlatives; that wants to be taken for what it really is by nature and heredity — this is a high attainment and psy- chologically not unworthy the grand old, but often abused term of regeneration.
Anger ^ is not yet sufficiently studied by psychologists, but the large vocabulary in the English language designating its states is itself enough to show it a strange and unique thing in human nature. A friend with whom we have lived for years grows pale or red on some provocation; clinches the fists; be- comes rigid; breathes stertorously; emits perhaps some barbaric and inhuman cry; has horripilation; shudders, twitches, stamps, * Conventionelle Luege. See also La Criminality Compar^e, ch. iv, civilization et mensonge, etc.
'See my Study of Anger. Am. Jour, of Psy., July, 1899, vol. x, pp. 516- 24 354 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE taps, writhes, paws, or assumes some strange attitude or pos- ture; may butt his or her own head against hard objects; makes faces; often bites; in many of our returns the person scratches, pinches, pulls, kicks, hugs, strikes, and possibly kills; says cruel biting things in a hard, strange voice, and afterward is weak, limp, perhaps nauseated, bilious, sick; full of re- grets and it may be apologies, and new resolves never again to fall into such a state of abandon. Anger is indeed a brief in- sanity, a sava animi tempestas, a furor suggesting epilepsy or the eruption of an alien spirit. It makes man a savage beast to his fellow man. The etymology of the words designating it are strangling, writhing, bursting, tearing, swelling, yelling, crushing, biting, boiling, inflammation, convulsion, conflagra- tion, storm, rabies, rancid, acidity, etc.
Both forensic medicine and psychiatry have dealt much with the iracundia morhosa, and many have thought that the anger mania furnished an irresistible impulse which obliterated psy- chic freedom. Friedreich thinks the storm of this passion may temporarily quite obstruct the power of self-direction, and Fuerbach says " murder in the moment of passion is a crime possible for the noblest natures," and urges that crimes com- mitted in sudden anger should always have special study. When Job was tempted to curse God and die; when we are goaded to desperation by disasters and misfortunes following swiftly and blighting all we care for; when the criminal in solitary confinement breaks out, yells, smashes, tears clothes and bedding; when the Malay runs amuck, stripping off all clothing, perhaps greasing his body, and stabbing every one in reach till he is killed or stunned, because pain, grief, and gloom have made him sick at heart — we see what this frenzy may be. The Berserker rage in the Viking Age sometimes vented itself in tremor, gnashing of the teeth, frothing at the mouth, howling, and perhaps, like Orlando Furioso, venting frenzy upon inani- mate things. Some insane monarchs, whom Ireland has de- scribed, seem to have been chronically in this stage, as if, like Mohammed Toghlac, who had a passion for bloodshed and torture, their object was to exterminate the whole human race. Ivan the Terrible was simply a human tiger, in one case causing some 27,000 children to be slain before his anger was placated.
Anger seems sometimes to be glad, spontaneous, breaking JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 355 out with no known cause, but is generally provoked by cross- ing or thwarting a strong purpose, by contradiction, invasion of the sacred sphere" of self, limitation of freedom, wounded pride, jealousy, personal antipathies to dress, habits, automa- tisms; at adolescence nearly if not quite all these causes are more keenly felt, and yet anger in normal cases, after a first period of intensification, slowly becomes more suppressed and internal. The motives of jealousy and wounded personal dignity increase in the greatest ratio. With puberty, our re- turns show also a marked increase in realizing the injury wrought by outbreaks and a great effort at self-control by many methods and devices. Those who are angry, with an utter abandon, and were spitfires before, begin to realize both the danger and the ugliness of temper, and with girls who have been violent before there is always a very powerful apparatus of repression which comes into operation at puberty. The young woman's life is far more subjective and in the teens she almost always learns to control the more violent physical out- breaks, but may become whining, peevish, or use her tongue in place of her fists. Anger is often so vigorously suppressed out- wardly that it strikes in and vitiates the general disposition.