This law of a period of freedom that leans a little toward license before the human colt is haltered and broken to any of the harnesses of severe discipline, is favored by every aspect of the bionomic law. It is a fact of great significance not only unexplored but hitherto unnoted, that even as the psychic per- turbations of this stage of multifarious impulsions are lost to recollection, because they are so inconsistent and blind, since they lack the intellectual factor of experience, just so the phy- letic stages in the development of the race that correspond to puberty fall largely in the unhistoric period — the darkest of all dark ages, during which brute became man. Science explores the simian forms of life, but here our sense of ignorance is increasingly painful. The distribution of the gorilla is rapidly narrowing toward early extinction, and we know far less of its characteristics, or those of the gibbon, ourang, and chim- panzee, than we do of the lowest races of men. The interval between the highest anthropoid brain of 550 cubic centimeters, and that of the lowest man, 1,150 cubic centimeters, is almost as lost as a sunken Atlantis. If we take Canstadt man, per- haps the lowest in Europe, as the point of reemergence of man's phyletic history, we find the most radical transforma- tions.
In the interval that separates the pithecoid from the trog- lodyte, many changes, perhaps more momentous than any in the historic period, took place. Arboreal life and a diet of fruits, nuts, and buds was exchanged for a life well adjusted to fluvial and littoral conditions. The shore — the most changing of all the life areas, the great feeding-ground of aquatic and terres- trial forms, where all land animals originally came from their primordial home in the sea, after long amphibian apprentice- ship, and where the whale, seal, and other backsliders to aquatic life reverted after long experience on the land — had already been the highway of extended migration; and man, especially if monophyletic and if the qualities that gave him supremacy over 92 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the brutes were developed in a single narrow area, had multi- plied rapidly; had learned the use of fire and cooking, thus free- ing energy, hitherto needed for digestion, to higher uses; had entered the paleolithic stage of chipped stone for spear and ar- row heads; had asserted his dominion over the mammoth, cave- bear, hyena, woolly rhinoceros, Irish elk; had invested himself with the freedom of the world; had become the most migratory of all species, thus favoring amphimixis and variation by ex- ogamy, and knew no barrier because only man stops man. He had been forced from some primitive home or cunabula, perhaps by the slow submergence of Sclater's Lemuria, or driven from his pristine habitat on the high table-lands north of the Hima- layas, and had already begun his career over the globe. During this period many of the scores of domestic animals had been tamed — perhaps mostly, as O.T. Mason thinks — by women who began pastoral life. Many of the two hundred and forty-nine species of plants of which de Candolle traces the history — all phanerogamous — were brought under culture also perhaps first by women, and thus settled agricultural life had been intro- duced. The hand had been developed much in structure, and far more in function, from a simple prehensile organ to a tool and weapon user and even maker. Dress had evolved, a mo- mentous change had come about by focusing development upon intelligence as soon as its high survival and selective value made itself felt, leaving the body relatively unchanged while mind evolved enormously, if not disproportionately, like the giraffe's neck. Infancy had been prolonged, and, with it, parental care, love and home, and the possibilities of education unfolded. Speech and tradition had been acquired. From this point all is relatively easy of explanation, for as Lyell said, if all but one race of men in a single spot of the globe were exterminated, they would soon people the earth again though they \vere as low as the Eskimo or South Sea Islander. Perhaps primitive man had already grown to gigantic stature, as Principal Dawson conjectures, and did and dared at sea, in hunting, and in cross- ing barriers, that which modern man would not. Perhaps he was a pigmoid, as the horse has grown from the orohippus of fox size; perhaps he was Broca's estromelian, half monster and half man; or more akin to Lombroso's degenerate mattoid, or to Sergi's hominidae. Perhaps McRitchie's conjecture that FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 93 fairies were primitive dwarfs or mid-men is valuable; it is in line with the \vide-spread superstition that arrow-heads are fairy darts. He may have been pliocene, diluvial, or even tertiary.
My own belief, as I have set forth elsewhere,1 is that man early became the wanderer and the exterminator par excellence. Less than any other animal, can man tolerate rivals in the struggle for existence. The instinct which impelled him to exterminate the North sea-cow in 1767, and, in the nineteenth century, the great awk in 1840, the African quagga in 1870, and scores of other animals and birds that in recent times have gone forever even beyond the reach of the collector, that is now rapidly reducing to the vanishing point the American bison, the Indian lion and rhinoceros, the walrus, the zebra-giraffe, halibut, oyster, lobster^ etc., and that prepares and sells the skins of two million birds a year, which are dying out that man may have food, safety, or sport, is the same instinct which in pre- historic times destroyed chiefly or with aid of other causes the gigantic extinct mammals, and has forever scarred man's soul with fear, anger, and wanton cruelty. The same enmity against the lower races, which in our day has exterminated forever the Boethuks, the Tasmanians, and is reducing so many lower human ethnic stocks to make way for favored races, is but a relic of the rage which exterminated the missing links and made man for ages the passionate destroyer of his own pedigree, so that no trace of it is left.
A great number of the phyletic corollates of some of the most marked stages by which prepubescent boyhood passes to maturity exist only in the later phases of this transition from anthropoid to savage life, although many are found earlier and others later yet. To much in this dark interval early adoles- cence is the only key, but even here the record is so distorted, falsified, so often inverted, so mingled with what belongs to later phases, that we know as yet but little how to use this key. To-day youth is passed in an environment of culture, nearly every element of which is far superior to anything that it could produce. The powers of imitation and appropriation are so 1 The Relation of Civilization and Savagery. Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., January, 94 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE developed and perhaps hypertrophied that it is impossible to distinguish what comes from indigenous and what from ac- quired sources. The past and future contend with each other for mastery. In his elegiac moods, youth seems to long for a lost idea in a way that suggests transmigration of a Platonic Wordsworthian type, as plants dream of the sun, and on the other hand, his esthetic sensibilities are presentiments of a superior stage of the race that will develop out of the present human type which it is the function of art to prophesy and anticipate. The processes last to be attained are least assured by heredity and most dependent upon individual effort, in aid of which nature gives only propulsion, often less defined the later it can be acquired, like the Kantian pure autonomous " ought- ness," which the individual must laboriously shape by a wise use of heteronymous and consciously regulated motives. While adolescence is the great revealer of the past of the race, its earlier stages must be ever surer and safer and the later possi- bilities ever greater and more prolonged, for it, and not maturity as now defined, is the only point of departure for the superanthropoid that man is to become. This can be only by an ever higher adolescence lifting him to a plane related to his present maturity as that is to the well-adjusted stage of boy- hood where our puberty now begins its regenerating metamor- phoses.
CHAPTER XI ADOLESCENT LOVE Physical self-consciousness — Nudity in history and its pedagogy — Early phallicism and the reactions against it — Sex and mental growth — Relations between the child and the race — Evolutionary stages of secondary sex qualities — Morbid- ities of this instinct — Inadequate treatment of the topic — Animal and primi- tive human courtship — The dominant influence of the female — Common love fetishes in the young — Highly specialized points of attraction and repulsion between the sexes — Coquetry — Convention and suggestiveness — Relation of love to man, death, esthetics, music, and religion — Courtship — First falling in love — Its power to sensitize the soul to nature— Psychological states and metaphors — Love as related to interests and achievements and to friendship — Its irradiations to children, the community and humanity — Knowledge as a form of love — Classification of theories — Lessons for education and morality.
IN the child's slowly progressive knowledge of its own body, hands, fingers, mouth, feet, toes, ears, eyes, hair, and nose, in about this order, seem to be especially noticed or attended to with interest each at its own period before the sex parts, which in children normally reared attract little attention in early years. But in infants, these organs may very early become the sea of knismogenic (knismos = tickling) sensations, and a little later in early boyhood the least allusion to them is ex- tremely gelogenic (gelos = laughter). These experiences are different from the tickle feeling aroused by contact with other parts of the body or by other humorous suggestions, and may be infantile rudiment from which, if we knew more of genetic psychology, we could trace the evolution of the whole sym- phony of sexual feelings and acts.1 Young children sometimes become so exquisitely sensitized that the remotest hint or sug- gestion, act, or indication without contact, is sufficient to pro- duce convulsions of often suppressed laughter. Even after adolescence there is a strange rapport and perhaps some kinetic equivalence between giggling and sexual psychoses; more 1 See my Early Sense of Self. Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1898, vol. ix, pp.
95 9 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE probably,.however, giggling is due to atavism or to arrest. It would almost seem in infancy that these sensations are re- lated to those of adult sexual activity somewhat as the organs of the infant are to those of the man. Laughter and tears are as primal and generic as pleasure and pain, the sovereign mas- ters of human life, and in hysteria sometimes seem to function not only alternately but vicariously.
I. The unconsciousness of the normal child makes it, though naked, not ashamed. It has no private parts, and its consciousness is in this respect not unlike that of animals. Many have praised this pristine Adamic innocence, and some have even thought it desirable to preserve it as long as possible. The Spartans required their youth not only to exercise publicly thus and even in the presence of the other sex, but compelled them to show themselves every six weeks to the Ephors that they might satisfy themselves, by inspection, of their purity and general vigor. It has been suggested that this makes directly for virtue, and so eminent an anthropologist as Angus has urged that, other things being equal, the more naked savages are the more moral they are found to be. The state of the organs to some extent reveals vice, which clothing conceals. Diogenes and the cynics may or may not have had this in mind in their exposures and in performing all acts usually concealed in pub- lic. The Spartan ideal evidently was that exposure made for healthfulness in these parts, and that heat and cold, wind and weather, tempered virtue, while covering not only concealed the immediate effects of vice, but both its warmth and its fric- tion tended to provoke it. Strikingly akin to the effects of more or less nudity or dress are the effects of the wider or narrower range of reserve in speech, which the fashions of different ages and races prescribe with such accuracy. When we reflect that just whatever area of topics parents and adults shun is instinctively counted vile by children and becomes a psychic zone of prudery, which curiosity ever at- tempts to invade and modesty to avoid, we can realize how strong a case might be made out, provided man lived in warm climates, in primitive conditions, in the country, etc., for naked- ness and plainness of speech, and how well this might comport with an ideal state of innocence, which, if it ever existed, is now forever gone. As a psycho-pedagogic theory, a reversion- ADOLESCENT LOVE 97 ary goal or term, or as an even possible reminiscence of the race, this conception is a precious element in man's spiritual idealization of his own life.
II. The dawn of adolescence is marked by a special con- sciousness of sex. Young people are psychologically in the con- dition of Adam and Eve when they first knew they were naked. There is a special kind of sex shame hitherto unknown. This access of modesty is a favorite and theoretically fascinating theme for genetic psychology. It supplies one of the powerful motives for dress. The reason of this instinct is not all to be sought in convention, but one of its motives seems to be a part of the impulse to round out and command one's own personal- ity, and also to -enlarge it, which is analogous to Lotze's theory that clothes are to extend the limits of self and make the wrearer feel himself to the extremity of every feather, skirt, ribbon, hat, and even cane. The new sensitiveness of these organs, which makes them so acutely responsive to psychic states which their condition reveals, is also involved. But we have much reason to assume that in a state of nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the new local develop- ment. I think it will be found that exhibitionists are usually those who have excessive growth here, and that much that modern society stigmatizes as obscene is at bottom more or less spontaneous and perhaps in some cases not abnormal. Dr. Seerley tells me he has never examined a young man largely developed who had the usual strong instinctive tend- ency of modesty to cover himself with his hand, but he finds this instinct general with those whose development is less than the average.
My distinguished teacher, Ludwig, the leading physiolo- gist of his time, once told me that he thought that for some years about nine-tenths of the psychic processes of adolescents centered in sex and its functions, if we give the latter a broad interpretation. However excessive this estimate may be, there is an intense natural curiosity and possibly sometimes a faint recrudescence of the sentiment ascribed to the cynics that it is a bad sign to cover, and that exposure is a sign of honesty as well as of purity. The virtuous man strips well if necessary, and does not blush. The literature on sex abounds in cases not only of virtuous young men, but even women, who rather 98 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE glory in occasions when they can display the beauty of their forms without reserve, not only to themselves and to loved ones, but even to others with proper pretexts. Medical experi- ence, art school, and gymnasia abound in such instances, and there are still other fields of evidence that where the common reserves of concealment have once been broken down, there is a sort of wild and perhaps atavistic ecstasy in exposure. In many primitive religions it has been an act of worship to glory in what society deems shame, and many a youth and even maiden, from the Spartan days down, often under elaborately ritualized conditions, have stripped ad majorem Dei gloriam. God sees through all disguises, and hence unclothing is a sym- bol of successfully challenging divine inspection. Moreover, not only malicious rumor and libel may be defied, for vice seeks concealment, but in many times and places it has been thought a bad sign to keep the body too persistently covered. Disrob- ing has been the climax of many a romance, defied many an enemy, vindicated the innocence of many a suspected or accused person. Tertullian prayed in substance that his soul and body might stand forth naked, stripped of every rag of disguise be- fore God and man. It is a hard and high principle, alien to most civilizations of history, but on occasions of great emprise, of oath or solemn vow, in times of national calamity, or as the most spermatic ritual of prayer, man may attest the profundity of his sincerity and faith, and woman may offer herself in the arena as a martyr and become a sacrifice fit for the altar of the gods and make this reversion to pristine innocence sublime. It is a talisman of wondrous power with gods and men.1 It is a lamentable fact that most of the writers on phallicism —Jennings, Inman, Forlong, Rocco, Westorp, Howard, 1 The story of Lady Godiva, Dr. A. F. Chamberlain tells me, has Bengal and Hindu parallels (Gomme: Ethnology and Folk- Lore, p. 28 et seq.\ Witness also Grimm's Marchen of the Star Dollars. Maitland's Science of Fairy Tales, p. 71 et seq. An experience of my own- ended in complete undress and a rank sense of freedom and lightness. (My Early Memories. Fed. Sem., vol. vi, p. 504.) Papuans "glory in their nudeness and consider clothing fit only for women." (Westermarck: History of Human Marriage, p. 118 et seq.'} Reclus (Primitive Folk, pp. 91, 333) describes nudity in religious rites, and Ploss, its ceremonial use as a love charm (Das Weib, vol. i, p. 352). Nakedness is probably, as Schurtz says (Philosophic der Tracht, p 48), more often a reversion than the survival of a primitive state, although it may sometimes be the latter.
ADOLESCENT LOVE 99 Knight, and many others — seem to lack greatly either in learn- ing or the critical spirit and moderation of science, or both; but this fact is rather a result of the long taboo that has been placed upon this subject than an indication that it is either less vast or less important than these writers claim. None can doubt that Phallos and Kteis, or Linga and Yoni, and their emblems under many a name and in many forms, have been widely, if not almost universally, worshiped at some stage of the devel- opment of our race, and that Lares and Penates, El and Jah, Astarte and Ashtaroth, Baal and Peor, Istar and Libissa, Isis and Osiris, Lira and Kali, and perhaps many other gods and goddesses, have phallic features or traits in their cult. L. Gu- lick l has popularly summed up the evidence that Judaism owed many of its chief traits to the long struggle with the phallic religion of Canaan to which its adherents were so prone to lapse, and Buckley 2 has epitomized its status in modern Japan. The fact that in all primitive languages gender plays so im- portant a role, and that most objects are sexed, makes even the contention that not only the symbolic ichthus and the sun, but perhaps many ancient monoliths and towers from Babel down to the caduceus, and it may be the cross, are understood as male; and the moon, the golden fleece, Dante's mystic rose of dawn, the Grail, and many a cave and vase, female organs. Moreover, one need not be versed in the occult, gnostic, sibyl- line, Orphic, Rosicrucian, or other recondite and esoteric mys- teries, to understand that the gem in the lotus, the serpent, the marriage of heaven and earth, and many a round table or sacra- mental mystery, may be typical of the function of the Teutonic goddess, Frigga.3 We have in the Christian doctrine of love, and of the spermatic logos, in the Platonic stages of eroticism in the symposium, abundant evidence that the race has had a sexual consciousness more all-dominating and pervasive than now appears, and many a conception in nearly if not quite all 1 A series of articles in the Association Outlook, 1901.
1 Phallicism in Japan. Dissertation. University of Chicago, 1895.
8 Gushing, speaking of the Zunis (First National Congress of Mothers, p. 41), says: "They worship the sun and the moon, earth, and the phenomena of the seasons personified chiefly in relation to reproductivity and growth. In other words, these people are so-called phallic worshipers, but a far better name for this kind of worship would be mother- worshipers. I have scant patience with those 100 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE religions, primitive, ethnic, or Christian, shows many traces of having been slowly sublimated and refined out of these bases. Perhaps this phanerogamic stage had much to do in making man an aberrant type, but certainly transcendental phallicism is one of the great — if not the greatest — achievements of the race.
Both ancient muthos and logos are full of this element, and the recognition of this fact gives us a key of magic power to unlock many of the most abstruse mysteries of life, creed, and of cult. The power of this factor to extend its subtle connota- tions afar and to keep alive many a rite and faith that seemed to have no raison d'etre; to work its mystic charm through many a sphere of influence where it is not suspected; to speak with a subtle voice that is heard through many ages, so that its fainter accents are not easily lost — when all this is understood, we shall be able to extend some charity even to the many writers like the above, often accused of illustrating a strange tendency to go crazy when sex is spoken of, and perhaps even condone many such errors and crudities of all who have attained true biological insight into human life. Indeed, for one, the more I read, ponder, lecture, and know life, especially among adoles- cents, whose lives are such an open sesame to the history of the race, the more natural it seems to expect that the vaticinations of these sex-intoxicated mystics should be not more, but less, than the actual historic truth. Poetry abounds in archaic sym- bolisms that suggest it; etymologies are steeped in it; it supplies a long-sought missing link in psychogenesis; it shows forth the work of religion in the world as even more sublime and majes- tic than any of its devotees have ever dreamed; it furnishes the simple solution of many a problem of life and mind, and re- veals how entirely the burden of the Bible has sprung from the very heart of man's deepest nature and his direst need.
III. Having had its career and done its work first where it of our race who denounce, on the mere notion that its name conveys, this religion of reproduction, for in reality, although one of the earliest, it is certainly also one of the most beautiful of the religions of mankind. We hear much about sensuosity and indecency as connected with the ceremonials of this worship, but, believe me, such claims are in most cases due to the evil imagination or else misrepresentation of those who make them. There is certainly no truth in their allegations regard- ing the worship of reproduction so long at least as it is associated or idertified with the matriarchate phase of human development and with the worship of motherhood."
ADOLESCENT LOVE 101