PRESIDENT OF CLARK UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY VOLUME II NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Published May, TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER IX PAGE CHANGES IN THE SENSE? AND THE VOICE...i CHAPTER X EVOLUTION AND THE FEELINGS AND INSTINCTS CHARACTERISTIC OF NORMAL ADOLESCENCE..40 CHAPTER XI ADOLESCENT LOVE 95 CHAPTER XII ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE AND A NEW EDUCATION IN SCIENCE 144 CHAPTER XIII SAVAGE PUBIC INITIATION'S, CLASSICAL IDEALS AND CUSTOMS, AND CHURCH CONFIRMATION...232 CHAPTER XIV THE ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION,...281 CHAPTER XV SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS. 363 CHAPTER XVI INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION...449 v vi THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE CHAPTER XVII ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION...561 CHAPTER XVIII ETHNIC PSYCHOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY, OR ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 648 INDEX OF SUBJECTS...749 INDEX OF NAMES...765 CHAPTER IX CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE I. Touch: Changes in discriminative sensibility— Pain — Pressure — Minimal con- tact— The tickle sense and its archaic origin — Basal nature of touch — Intoler- ance of roughness and depilation — Dermal sense — Skin toilets. II. Taste: Hunger the other basis of genetic psychology - Freakiness of appetite and its changes for both food and drink at puberty — Nutritive and practical needs — Phylogenetic suggestions. III. Smell: Historical hints — Relation to sex — Experimental tests — New subjective relations and associations — Blushing and its origin. IV. Hearing: Changes in range — Discrimination and new interest in sounds in nature or music. V. The Voice: Sound in the insect and higher animal world — Relations to love and war — Mutation in animals and men — Differences between change of voice in girls and boys — Individual variations. VI. Sight: Changes in the field of vision — New color sense — Experiments — Optical judgments — New visual interests — Color vocabularies. VII. General craving for sense stimuli — The age of sense — Dangers — Internal sensations.
HAVING, in the chapters that precede, considered physical growth and the mental and moral perversions incident to adolescence, and given an anthology of descriptions of various phases of this transitional stage of life as conceived or experi- enced by men and women of historic or literary eminence, we have, in the chapters that follow, to consider its normal genetic psychology, beginning with sensation and proceeding to feel- ings, will, and intellect. The material for what follows is newer, more difficult, and more incomplete, but although many data are already at hand, there has never been any attempt, within my knowledge, to bring them together or to draw the scientific and practical inferences they suggest. Many of the special studies to be considered are based upon too insufficient numbers to be more than tentative, but in coordinating their results they very commonly shed surprising light upon each other, and their themes are often vividly illustrated and con- 2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE elusions aided by analogies with growth or by the more salient facts of mental disease or moral perversion, so that on the whole the larger -and more important features of this half of the picture appear with considerable distinctness. I am well aware that so great is the interest and importance of the field, and such the momentum of challenging questions that at present incite to further research in all parts of this rich domain now so promisingly opened, that great additions to our knowl- edge in the near future are inevitable.
At adolescence, each of the senses undergoes certain char- acteristic changes of structure, function, or both. Interests change and with them the organs of apperception, so that aspects and elements different from those hitherto absorbing the complex but already familiar objects of sense become foci of attention. While it is of course impossible to distinguish clearly between what is due to cerebral or psychic modification and that resulting from changes in the sense organs and their immediate centers, it is probable that the former greatly pre- ponderate, although they can not explain all the facts. One of the most important and comprehensive modifications is, that whereas most sense stimuli before this age tend strongly to provoke reflex reactions, after it these tend to be delayed or better organized, as if there were a marked increase of associa- tive or central functions. Before, the projection system pre- dominated, and stimuli, suggestion, and afferent processes gen- erally passed more readily over to the efferent or motor tracts; but now we have increased cerebral irradiations, and there is a marked advance in the development of the long-circuiting func- tions of thought, deliberation, and reflection. This, too, reacts upon sense and makes observation better. The deliverances of each sense also now begin to have a more independent value of their own. Sensations are more objectified and their pleasure and their pain effects are more keenly felt. There is a new sense esthetic or enjoyment of the sensation itself for its own sake. The comesthesias, or associations of senses on the basis of their organic feelings and tone effects, are now increased.
I. Touch. — According to Weber, discriminative dermal sensibility, measured by the distance of compass-points, de- creases with growth. His table is as follows: CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 3 Adult. Boy of 12 yrs. Mm. Mm.
1. Point of the tongue i.i i.i 2. Volar side of the finger-tip 2.3 1.7 3. Red part of lips; volar side of the second finger joint. 4.5 3.9 4. Back part of the third finger joint; point of the nose.. 6.8 4.5 5. Edge and middle of back of tongue; not red part of the lips; metacarpus of the thumb 9.0 6.8 6. Plantar side of the tip of the great toe 11.3 6.8 7. Palm of hand; cheek; outer lid 11.3 9.0 8. Middle of the hard palate 13.6 11.3 9. Back part of the forehead 22.6 18.0 10. Back part of the hand 31.6 22.6 12. Acromion 4°-6 13. Upper and lower part of the under arm 40.6 36. 1 14. Upper and lower part of the under thigh 40.6 36. 1 15. On the breastbone 45.1 33-8 17. Spine in the middle of the back 67.7 40.6 18. The middle of the upper arm and thigh 67.7 31.6 Weber also shows that with the longitudinal growth of the limbs and trunk the sensory circles of childhood grow more oblong, their longitudinal increasing more than their trans- verse axes.
Marro tested the increase of discriminative sensibility in eight girls and ten boys. At the first test, the girls were from seven to twelve years old and the boys from seven to four- teen. The following were his results in millimeters. The second test was made ten years later on the same subjects, and indicated diminution with advancing age, as follows: 1 Right Left Back of Front of wrist, finger-tip. finger-tip. hand. Right. Left.
From this Marro opines that the discriminative sensibility of the index-finger of the right hand diminishes from child- hood to maturity, although this might be due to the induration caused by work. He found girls more obtuse in this respect than boys, and thought the forehead grew insensitive to com- 1 La Puberte". Bull, de la Soc. de Med. Ment. de Belgique, 1894, p. 413.
4 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE pass-points in man, and less so in woman, with advancing age. Otherwise, both he and Lombroso thought touch more acute in young girls than later. This accords with Czermak, who found the topographic skin sense of children more acute than in adults. Since then this has generally been assumed, and ascribed to the fact that while the dermal surface increased, the number of tactile end organs remained constant. Thus it is plain that the most characteristic changes in dermal sensi- bility are not in fine distance discriminations. This declines somewhat with growth, which increases the interval between the tactile organs.
Carman J found that sensibility to pain decreased as age increased, except at twelve, with both sexes; that the left temple grew more sensitive than the right; and that girls were more sensitive than boys. Gilbert, too, found a gradual decrease of pain sensibility to pressure from sixteen to nine- teen, boys being less sensitive than girls throughout. Girls seemed to have reached the minimum of sensibility at thirteen, while for boys the most rapid decline began at that time and the difference increased from about 0.4 kg. to more than i kg. All these tests, however, have a large mean variation. Other algometric tests, although perhaps less care- ful than these, have led to somewhat different results. All tests, too, leave it undetermined whether it is less sensibility or increased power to bear pain that causes the threshold to be set higher. In view of the increased hardships, battles, etc., of this age, teleological modes of thought might have anticipated this general result. It suggests that tenderness now may be excessive, and that impact with the world of things must be more vigorous to produce the same result. Susceptibility to esthetic pain in the higher senses and in the skin itself seems to increase, and in the wondrous system of balances and harmonies in our nature this may be compensatory. I have some- where read statistics showing that of all wounds leaving per- manent scars found on the bodies of adult men, the time ol which could be remembered, most were received during pubes- cent years.
1 Pain and strength measurements of 1,507 school children in Saginaw, Mich Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1899, vol. x, pp 392-398.
CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 5 The skin and the nervous system are both developed from the external embryological layer, and all the higher senses arose as gradually differentiated and specialized forms of touch, which is the mother sense of them all. The psychic side of dermatology is thus the archaeological field of the psychologist, whose precept, when ultimate and especially genetic questions of sense-perception are discussed, must always be " back to touch," somewhat as the philosophical slogan often is " back to Kant," " to Plato," " to nature,? etc. The various dermal sensations, the modality of some of which is not yet deter- mined, constitute a complex basis for the discussion of the problem of reality, because their functions alone can give us the primary qualities of matter. The reason that theories of knowledge can not now give us the external world in all its full reality is because the latter rested upon touch, and the development of the higher senses has thus removed us many degrees from reality. Haptics is thus a paleopsychic field par excellence, and the exploration of this most extended of all senses involves a study of the entire dermal area, which, roughly speaking, is the boundary between the somatic ego and the non ego. No department of psychology is so attractive and so promising to those whose prime interest is in origins. One of my pupils has made an ingenious and very suggestive attempt to interpret a good part of the Scotch philosophy of common sense, especially as represented by Reid, Stuart, and Brown, as a more or less unconscious effort to base reality upon the deliverances of this sense.1 The pubescent age is marked by a new kind of dermal con- sciousness. There are often pimples and eruptions, and when these or scabs are formed there is an especially strong desire to remove them, and the habit of picking the skin sometimes for hours may become almost irresistible. Many returns specify a marked pubescent intolerance of the least roughness, a rage for picking the face so that scabs can not perform their healing function and the skin becomes so marfed with sores that sometimes permanent discolorations and even scars are left. Occasionally the skin is purposely pricked or abraded with a 1 Fraser: The Psychological Foundations of Natural Realism. Am. Jour, of 6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE pin to create roughness in order to enjoy the exquisite pleasure of removing it. Our records show some cases of youths who have been fond of dropping tallow from a lighted candle on to their hands to have the satisfaction of picking it off later. Hang-nails, callosities, blisters, and scabs, sometimes of large wounds, are never so intolerable and are impetuously removed despite much pain. Some, too, pull out hair from the head, eyebrows, lashes, hands, and elsewhere, despite the pain. In some cases games of rubbing the skin are noted. Whether there is a slight pruritus or a hunger for some specific dermal sensation, like light-hunger for the eye in the blind, or whether the skin is slightly anesthetic and its rights are thus invaded to secure the normal quota of stimulus, or there is a desire to satisfy the exquisite sensation of smoothness which, in hand- shaking and caressing of lovers, is so important a factor, we do not know. Perhaps some or all of these may have been elements and played their role in natural selection or even in the original depilation of the human body, the stroking of which is still a source of pleasure. This theme is a very im- portant and fascinating one from the standpoint of evolution and is akin to the theory of minimal touch excitations, which may provoke reactions of almost convulsive intensity. The increase of this form of the tickle sense is another unique fea- ture of this stage of life. Especially in states of fatigue and reduced control, the reactions are highly dynamogenic and the psychophysic law is in a sense inverted, for there is a point below which the slighter the touch the more intense is its result- ing sensation.
Minimal touch excitations suggest, and may thus perhaps represent, the very oldest stratum of psychic life in the soul, and, if so, have still in their strange sensitiveness and energy reminiscences of the primeval vigor and spontaneity of its dawn. Thus keenly perhaps did organisms once feel the world about them, and thus intensely did they react to it in that Eocene age of the soul befort the soma had been mechanized and before its vitality had lapsed to a degree of vigor which now separates it so far from that of the reproductive elements that it may be said to be a fallen thing and to have brought death into the world. However this may be, it is certain that haptic im- pressions are profoundly modified with the dawn of sexual life CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 7 in a way that suggests some mobilization of sensation con- nected with the new sexual functions and their organs.1 Thus we may infer that along with the increased self-feel- ing goes an augmented consciousness of everything that invades the contour of the body. As allochiria is diminished and the prepotency of the right side for muscular activity is known to increase at this age, it is not unlikely that the left side now ac- quires its slight advantage over the right in passive sensibility.
We have also evidence from returns and from anthropology that the secretion of sebum is augmented and that the skin becomes more glossy, an effect which it is often striven to in- crease or diminish by various crude cosmetics, and also that the secretion of sweat is more copious. Both these are factors in the new sense of cleanliness or uncleanliness which now arises.
In the middle teens there is often an increased general sen- sitiveness to heat and cold. Boys, and especially girls, are more sensitive to chills and prone to protect themselves, e. g., at night, by too warm clothing instead of exposing themselves to wind and weather, as hardy natures can with such advantage so easily be encouraged to do. This sensitiveness to external change may develop a delicate diathesis and even enervation. The optimum of temperature most favorable for all vital proc- esses, and which is instinctively sought by every creature that can migrate or even move, seems to have a range which is nar- rowed or widened with many corresponding new adjustments almost directly according to vigor or the health. Conversely, the body is often exposed to wind and sun with great predilec- tion.
Much as we need more careful age determinations here, the practical importance of correct dermal habits at this age can not be overestimated. A rugged life with abundant stimu- lation of the sense of contact, temperature, and even pain, has great prophylactic value in preventing the focalization of der- mal consciousness to the sexual parts and functions. Now, too, begins a sensitiveness, which is often extreme and per- sistent through life, especially in females, to the hand-shaking 1 See my fuller discussion of this subject: The Psychology of Tickling, Laugh- ing, and the Comic. Am. Jour, of Psy., October, 1897, vol. ix, p. 10 et seq.
8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE habit, which often mediates sudden likes and dislikes that are as deep-seated and ineluctable as those of smell. Many in our returns find it hard at this age to shake hands at all, and this aversion may culminate in settled misophobia, delirium of touch, or fear of contact and contamination. A gifted lady much before the public writes me: " At receptions, where I must shake hands with a long line of people, I sometimes take one that gives me a shudder of repulsion. It is not necessarily a moist, cold, clammy, or fish-tail hand, disagreeable as these are, and it is not wholly the muscular action. I do not believe in magnetic qualities, but the feel of some hands touches off an idiosyncrasy I felt first in the early teens. Some are pleasant, and this is quite independent of other qualities that affect my likes and dislikes. I used to say that however much I liked a man I could never marry him if I did not like the touch of his hand; and I feel so yet."
One of the many problems in this field is that of dermal hairs. The current theories of man's anthropoid descent ap- pealed to in explaining the loss of the lanugo of the fetus, although suggested by, do not so readily explain, the increased growth of hair or the impulse to remove it at puberty. Ploss thinks the latter almost universal, and we have perhaps here an interesting illustration of the great law, to be treated elsewhere, that organic functions tend to be repeated higher up the phyletic scale in the psychic field. Developmental processes, e. g., re- moved the lanugo, but now man tends to shave, pull out hairs, and otherwise to depilate his body. This, it has been suggested, is the nearly spent momentum that bared the skin of the hair of our pithecoid ancestors. As in all other impulses of this class, the half-subliminal hair consciousness is philophobiac or works both in the way of new love and new aversion under the influence of the nascent sexual life. On the one hand, we have increased love of coiffure, and on the other, we have the persistent impulse to shave or cut hair. The newly awakened skin consciousness at the same time prompts to undress and expose portions of the body in a way hitherto unknown, and also to tattoo, wear ornaments, and dress for a new motive. The erogenic zones on the breast, back, abdomen, etc., give a new love of caressing, stroking, patting, embracing, clasping hands, and kissing, getting into close contact over larger sur- CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 9 faces, with a new sensitiveness to contact along with new con- sciousness of arms, ankles, neck, etc. If Lotze's philosophy of clothes, as the physical extensions of the ego into all that in- creases height and point of contact through ribbons, canes, high headgear, etc., is true, it all begins at adolescence. Indeed, his measured paragraphs on the subject are real contributions to the new palpation consciousness of this age also expressed in blushing, and, in a very different way, in the ancient Roman, Turkish, and Oriental passion for baths, unguents, and skin toilet generally, which may develop into luxury and effemini- zation. We know that pigmentation is greatly increased at this age; and there is much indication that not only the tickle sensibility to minimal contacts, but also the range of discrim- ination for pressures, is augmented.
II. Taste. — The -true beginning for a psychology essen- tially genetic is hunger, the first sentient expression of the will to live, which with love, its other fundamental quality, rules the world of life. The more we know of the body, the more clearly we see that not only growth but every function has a trophic background; that through all the complex chemical bookkeeping of income and expenditure, every organ is in a sense a diges- tive organ; that the body is a machine for the conservation, distribution, and transmission of energy; and that man is, phys- ically considered, what he eats and what he does with it, or, better, what he completely digests. Food is the first object of desire, and all fins, legs, wings, and tails were developed either to get food or to escape finding a grave in some other crea- ture's stomach. It is as if the lower forms of life said to them- selves, " My world is my food," because there is less interest in anything else. They hibernate, hestivate, or migrate accord- ing to the food supply. Low forms of life that cease to be sessile do so to get food, which is the chief end of the world- wide struggle for survival, where the law, Eat or be eaten, is imperative. Some two-thirds or more of all the kinetic energy of the human body goes to digestion. Food is one of the first forms of property, and almost everything is food for some creature. In the slow processes of cephalization by which the brain and centers develop near the mouth end of the alimentary canal, the first laugh, if Spencer is right, was in prospect of 40 10 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE food, and says, when interpreted phyletically, " This is good enough to eat." The great epoch marked by the descent of fire and cooking not only economized digestion and freed its energy for higher uses, but evolved hearth, home, and meal- times. From the standpoint of the higher metabolism, every cell and tissue has its own specific hunger, and what we call appetite is a symphony of many parts or a net algebraic result aggregated from the specified hunger of all the tissues and cells. There is a struggle for survival between the different organs of the same soma for the food supply which the blood contains, and sensation, and perhaps thought, are in one sense functions of nutrition. If the parts and molecules latest to de- velop and most distinctively human, being more complex than others, and being those which from their extreme instability are most labile, are broken down in the function of thought and feeling, we can well understand that the nervous system, which is the master tissue of the body, may be the seat of the highest complexity, where matter is most nearly transubstantiated into soul. Pleasure and pain are closely linked with satiety and hunger. Happiness or euphoria, which nearly every form of greeting in the world first inquires for when friends meet, on the one hand, and disease, the chief fear of man, which brings functions to consciousness that should remain submerged, mor- bidifies visceral sensations into hypochondria and darkens into melancholia with forced feeding, on the other, are the extremes between which every normal and happy life unfolds. Sleep builds up brain cells, and in anemia we live on a lower nutri- tive level. If the products of decomposition or the clinkers in the furnace of life are not removed, one organ's food may be another's poison, and there is auto-intoxication and fungoid growth, and as the biproducts accumulate and the chip pile of dead matter increases there is progressive liability to infection by micro-organisms. In a sense every disease is due to cell hunger, and old age and death are progressive starvation. Most of the diseases of middle and later life are probably due to avoidable errors of diet. As we go up this scale of complete and high-level nutrition, there is growth, — physical, mental, or both, — the pleasure field widens, and the maximum of utilized