was indigenous, no doubt a great and sacramental one, laying just stress upon the supreme function of man, giving it the place of highest sanctity and perhaps making it the act of con- summate worship, phallicism gradually lapsed to an ever lower position, long persisting as a secret cult, until it became, in the unworthy, a stimulus for sense and passion, and in the logic of history was slowly sloughed off as the elect remnant of man- kind slowly found out a new and higher way. Possibly this change may have been in some way related to the slow migra- tion northward of races, and a new thermal function of cloth- ing. Perhaps as races grew and spread and life had to be sus- tained by work in soils not tropically spontaneous, labor and healthful fatigue became a factor of purity. With dress, even the scantiest and most local, attention was more and more long-circuited to general form, figure, complexion, face, eyes, hair, and all the secondary sexual qualities, love antics, dances, and song, helped to drag the race upward from a flood of cor- ruption. Asceticism is based on a normal instinct, and as the soul realized the cause of its woe, it abhorred what it had most loved, burned what it had worshiped, and perhaps by instincts akin to those that vowed poverty, chastity, and obedience, re- garded every manifestation that could be called sexual as lewd and crapulous. At any rate, I think no one who has carefully availed himself of the knowledge now at hand can doubt that there was a later period when men assiduously scored away, wherever it was possible, all traces of earlier phallicism and be- came iconoclastic toward all its documents — literary, monu- mental, symbolic, verbal, and religious; when they thought races who still held the old faith wrere only worthy of exter- mination, and were often blind and fanatical in their holy rage. This counter current would be true to the laws of sexual psy- chology, in which reaction always follows activity, and explains very simply so much that is baffling in the contrasts and fre- quently the sudden alternations of individuals from debauchery to prudery and vice versa.
My contention, then, is that young people, especially boys, in their development, as later shown, afford the ontogenetic parallel to these phyletic stages, each, as I think no one has previously suggested, confirming and illustrating the other and affording the developmental bases of explanation, hitherto lack- 102 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ing, for certain forms of sexual perversion or arrest.1 If this view be correct, the race at one time, or nearly every ethnic stock at some time early in its development, let itself go until it found that, as Hegel describes in his Phenomenology, pleasure has its limits in pain and must be compensated. Then came a period of humiliation and conviction of unworthiness or sin, in which man undertook to convert himself, but although he groveled and many despaired, the elect pressed on, yearning for the reincarnation of love in its primitive, high, holy, and wholesome sense in their midst. Perhaps in this abjectness there was pious longing upward for a purer love to supervene from above. Thus man's history may explain to some degree why it is that sexual remorse is still, as we have seen in Chap- ter VI, the religious teacher's great opportunity, and may make us realize how, in the philosophy of history, a true incarnation of love is the object of such long, fervent, and prophetic desire, and its evangel so welcome to those who need it.
As to the typical development of the sentiment of love in the individual, we still know too little, i. An infantile form of it is often seen between boys and girls under the age of eight.2 It is then transparent, with no self-consciousness, and appears in fondness for each other's company, gifts for keep- sakes, especially edibles, and often in embraces and kisses. Jealousy is often well developed, and there is no mutual shyness or fear of ridicule between the little sweethearts, who some- times assume that they will marry and even prattle of details of life together. In rare cases such attraction has culminated in happy and fruitful wedlock. This precocity of love is of scien- tific interest as illustrating in the individual what is probably an inversion of the order of the development of the race, in which the somatic seems to precede. It is Platonic and in a sense sexless, a purer affinity of soul than is generally possible later. To adult onlookers it is an entertaining spectacle, and to 1 It is chiefly the degraded aspect of these themes that Barnes (Feelings and Ideas of Sex in Children; Fed. Sem., vol. ii, p. 199} thinks nineteen-twentieths of American children learn from back alleys, servants, etc., filling their minds with words that go back to Aryan beginnings, but which it is a crime to print, and with abnormal visual images highly potentialized at puberty that are not only dirty and vulgar, but false.
1 The Emotion of Love between the Sexes, by Sanford Bell. Am. Jour, of ADOLESCENT LOVE some, especially women, an ideal and prophecy of a new Edenic state of purity, but it is very doubtful if it is either a good sign or a desirable educational experience, especially for boys, to thus early individualize their interest in others, although it is immeasurably better than the vile physical precocity described in Chapter VI. The child marriages of the Orient do not, of course, rest on any such basis. It is exotic, like infant piety, limits the range of association normal at this age, tends to physical prematurity, and a fostering interest of grown-ups in it is, albeit unconsciously to them, a form of selfishness on their part which indulges their own delectation at the expense of the best interests of the child. Yet," like so many other phenomena, it suggests, as does very early physical development, the possi- bility of traces of a, prehistoric early ripeness in some pigmoid stage that, like the persistence or hypertrophy of rudimentary organs seen in teratology, has failed of proper reduction in its season. If so, it is a phenomenon of arrest and not of progress. 2. Later, as Bell has shown, at from perhaps eight to twelve or fourteen, comes another phase of juvenile love. There is acute interest in some person of the other sex, but it is no longer unconscious. The object of attraction is followed, but at a distance. There are gifts, no longer face to face, but secretly and perhaps anonymously. There is no confession, but con- fusion in each other's presence. There is no open pairing off, and teasing is often fatal. Fear of ridicule is so great that accusation of interest or taunts may prompt to denial or even to censure and asseveration of dislike, which may lead to sudden mutual aversion and even hate. Babcock,1 out of eighty-three games of Washington children, calls thirty love games, like post-office, King William, London Bridge, picking grapes, dropping the handkerchief, digging a well, etc., which owe their charm to choosing a partner, embracing, or kissing, or both. Thus preferences are freely expressed, but apparently imper- sonal and masked by the rules of the game. The eyes feast on the loved one, but furtively and from afar. Boldness is in- creased with the fall of darkness. The girl at this stage is often less guarded and more aggressive than the boy. It is not 1 Am. Anthropologist, vol. i, p. 243. Lippincott's Mag., March and Sep tember, 1886.
104 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE called loving, but liking, which is partly a euphemism and partly a fitter designation of the juvenile state of mind. Boys deny it far more readily upon occasion than girls. Some never confess either to the object of their love or to any con- fidant, child or adult, but may ostentatiously speak slightingly. They are ill at ease with each other and perhaps would be ashamed to be seen together, and the object of an ardent passion lasting for several years may never suspect it. Its chief out- crop may be a hostile demonstration toward a fancied rival. Perhaps avowal is made in a note sent through a friend, or even with the identity of the writer carefully concealed, or motto candy, valentines, ornaments, curios, keepsakes, fruit, picture cards, etc., are sent. In school these mates often love to sit or stand together and seek contact that must appear to be acci- dental. Favoritism is shown by intentionally missing a word so that the other shall profit by it, or helping in study or recita- tion. If one is absent from school, the other grows lax, indif- ferent, or irritable, suggesting that such attractions are often an incentive to good work that pedagogic tact could utilize. Some brace up in study for years to please or win the favor of another. A form of courtship may consist solely in touching feet under the desk. Sometimes there is a profusion of billets- doux, pages long, by those who are tongue-tied together. A teacher who furnished Bell with seventy-six cases, said these childish loves " fairly broke out in the spring-time."
Showing off is perhaps the boy's chief expression of this callow calf love. He instinctively seeks to charm by somer- saults, walking fences, yodeling, aping animals in voice and act, mimicking people, wrestling, bullying his mates, and often tackling bigger boys, and sometimes courting danger, which in extreme cases has brought mayhem or death, hanging by the toes from trees, cutting the initials of his favorite in the ice, or carving or drawing them. There is much scuffling and horse- play, loud or grandiloquent talk to others, but really intended for her. A boy hugs another, his sister, or a pet in the pres- ence and for the benefit of his affinity. Here, too, the boy's courtship and its tension-vents are those of the savage writ small. To this repertory of fascination the girl responds per- haps by ostentatiously and studiously ignoring them all. Of all boys, the one who is so assiduously prancing attendance ADOLESCENT LOVE upon her as the best form of admiration he can offer, is the one of whose very presence she is most unconscious. This may be aversion, but it is more likely to be due to her dim but strong instinct to prompt him to a nearer and more personal expres- sion. No psychologist, but only her trusted confidante, and perhaps not she, can tell which it is. She might upon occa- sion slap him and afterward fancy or wish it had been a kiss. Meanwhile she is pondering whether she likes him as well as papa, mama, or even God, and is in some cases raising vexa- tious scruples in her budding conscience. Perhaps she includes him in her prayers with parents or pets, or fancies love and hate by turns. She writes his name or pronounces it in secret and wonders if she likes its sound or its association with others bearing the same name, is nice to another boy to goad him on, praises before him qualities he lacks or in which others excel, or condemns freckles, light hair, or some item of attire which characterizes him, but if he shows sign of lukewarmness or di- version to another, she comes forward with some sudden and unequivocal token. The first crude impulse of coyness often impels her to open scorn of what is secretly fascinating. Thus Boyville and Girldom reenact in pantomime a love life that was old when history began, for these fore-courts of love, which are so delicious, are more ancient than all the temples that civiliza- tion and culture have built for it, and these crude rehearsals are more essential and true to life than many of the more highly elaborated expressions of it that modern romance and conven- tion have superposed.
Another characteristic trait of this age, often strongly accen- tuated also in the next, or third stage, is juvenile love of an older person of the opposite sex. The interval may be ten or twenty years or even more. From the rather meager data avail- able, it would •appear that there is here less fickleness and more constancy, partly but not wholly because only the junior party changes, while the elder remains always only kind. With extreme disparity, this is most common where the free play of intercourse with other children of equal age is restricted. But beyond this there is a marked early and pre-adolescent pro- clivity to focus affection at least quite as sharply differentiated from that felt for parents as from the love of riper years, upon older counterparts. Some children of from four to six fall in 46 io6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE love with those of the later teens and early twenties or even older.1 These youngsters are often demonstrative, persistent, jealous, chatter about marriage, appropriate the object of their infatuation to see whom they eagerly abandon every playmate or occupation and comport themselves with every affectation of young gentlemen and ladies that they can attain. Grief at the marriage of the object of their choice is often violent. Ridicu- lous and often ominous as this is, it is often regarded by parents with complacency.
3. In the period from eight to thirteen or later, the tendency to older loves is more common, but the law seems to be that dis- parity lessens with age, falling to ten, five or less years. Al- though returns do not yet warrant statistics of frequency, boys seem to lead during the first part of this period, and girls later. Boys in the grades may select a young female teacher and be- come abject slaves to her slightest wish. She is idealized, at- tended on every occasion, overwhelmed with gifts and con- fidences, flattered by imitation conscious and unconscious. The object may reciprocate with a feeling half motherly and half amorous. Where the male is older there is more, yet still but little, real danger. The disparity of years is itself a safe- guard and the older feels the innocence of the younger to be a matter of honor, though conscious recognition and even more or less avowal is mutual. Often great good, especially to the younger, results, and the plasticity thus arising is wisely util- ized. Plato thought boys and older men should choose each others as lovers, and teaching should be a pay-less work of love, but the boy now often has female teachers only and must vent this propensity, if such it be, on them for want of an available male mentor. In one case I know, there was a series of four loves in about as many years, each younger than the pre- ceding, so that the sum of the ages of both did not vary greatly, the last being of nearly the same age as the lover — a case sug- gestive of what, as we shall see later, is by some thought a law of constant aggregate age of both parents for most effective child-bearing. Much of the sentiment of the younger party in most of these cases is made up of admiration, respect, and even reverence, and whatever return there may be by the older is of ADOLESCENT LOVE 107 a pleasing sense of having a protege to shelter, to be responsible for, dominate, and occasionally to domineer. Thus such rela- tions may be a wholesome fore-school to life. The charm to the younger is sometimes partly maturity itself, as if the budding nature was not satisfied with what childhood had to offer and was protensive toward adulthood. This, if to a degree that violates the wholesome rule of exhausting each stage of life as it is lived, is distinctly bad. So far as it is due to unconscious discontent with the little conventionalities that the sexes in- stinctively assume toward each other and to attraction toward one too old to think of them, and therefore more natural, it is better. The instability of childhood often turns to its elders and is thus saved from caprice by imitating a good pattern, and then it is love of a more finished product and of shaping the soul to an idealized model of the other sex. Even this is only a partial advantage at the age when the life of each sex should to some extent include rather than supplement that of the other. In general, attachments for elders or for well-developed specimens of the same sex are better at this age.1 1 The extreme of this latter, however, is seen in the so-called "mashes" so characteristic of adolescent girls and the hero-worship and fagging of boys. These homo-sexual relations were recognized in Greece for boys who were thought unfortunate, or in some way deficient if they did not have an adult patron. This prompted ideal conduct of the elder in the presence of the younger partner that none but the highest example be set, and general but not technical teaching and initiation into life. The elder must assume responsibility for the younger, inspire him and feel shame for his error or ignorance. That the relation lapsed to base- ness later should not blind us to the great possible advantages of it in many, if not every kind of social organization. Many of these, as we shall see later, are now utilizing it with good results. Not only is the ideal teacher primarily an older friend, fertilizing the soul with knowledge and bringing ideas to birth, but, as it is some- times said, every woman is always more or less in love with some man, so in the church, club, young peoples' organizations, and the tutorial system at its best, every youth is always profoundly influenced by some one a little older, and is more or less plastic to his or her will. Each is impressionable by some one stronger, more brilliant, or otherwise specially favored by nature or fortune, as he is not by others. The old and great are too far away, but most have this hero embodying an ideal. In girls, especially if isolated from the other sex, this homo-sexuality is also pervasive if less often organized under a leader, and its extreme form of " crushes " is more liable to do harm. The parasite is often given nervous poise, guided aright and gains new incentive, but also loses independence, and becomes a clinging vine just when she should learn to think and act for herself. The object of this kind of love is tempted to selfishness in accepting service, and may become domineering and masculine in manner. With girls, especially, these dangers, like 108 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 4. In the fourth stage, there is a rather distinct period that begins with puberty which is marked by a general tendency of the sexes to draw apart for a season. The barks of love built before are mostly too frail to cross the breakers that separate childhood from youth. The new interests now born are too many, strange, sudden, and absorbing. Each is a new creature, and all relations, ideas, and ideals are changed. A new im- pulsion to develop and perfect a personality all one's own arises in each sex. Sex itself means other and more than before, and reserve and a new sex consciousness unfold. Modes of life, in- terests, and plans for the future differentiate. The boy becomes a little ashamed of girl associates and is desirous of asserting his manhood, while the girl is more conscious if not more coy. Each is more aware of the other's scrutiny and often a little fearful of it. Persistence of the old camaraderie would now have a different and more serious meaning, and each is a little wary of being attracted into the other's sphere. Nearly every known primitive race now isolates the sexes for a time from each other, and perhaps this ancient practise now appears as an instinct which reenforces the necessity for a period of restraint.
It is tempting to speculate on how essential this stage of segre- gation has been for the progress of the human race, and how, if it is ignored, familiarity, which sometimes breeds contempt, may here disenchant and impair the motives for a proper rap- prochement later when full nubility is achieved. This theme must be left for the chapter on the education of girls.
5. The age of love, in the full and proper sense of the word, slowly supervenes when body and soul are mature, and on this we must dwell longer and seek to analyze and describe its ele- ments. The world has long waited for an adequate treatment of this vast and vital theme, but that modern psychology is now approaching it from so many sides is one of the most hopeful facts of the present age.
The development of the sex function is normally, perhaps, the greatest of all stimuli to mental growth. The new curiosity and interests bring the alert soul into rapport with very many facts and laws of life hitherto unseen. Each of its phenomena worse ones for both sexes previously described, are part of the price modern man must pay for the prolonged prenubile apprenticeship to life. All are needful to human progress, dearly as it is bought.
ADOLESCENT LOVE 109 supplies the key to- a new mystery. Sex is the most potent and magic open sesame to the deepest mysteries of life, death, re- ligion, and love. It is, therefore, one of the cardinal sins against youth to repress healthy thoughts of sex at the proper age, because thus the mind itself is darkened and its wings clipped for many of the higher intuitions, which the supreme muse of common sense at this its psychologic moment ought to give. If youth are left to themselves and the contagion of most environments, this mental stimulus takes a low turn toward lewd imaginations and vile conceptions, which under- mine the strength of virtue, and instead of helping upward and making invulnerable against all temptation, it makes vir- tue safe only in its absence and prepares the way for a fall, when its full stress is first felt.1 IV. Neither the psychology nor the pedagogy of adoles- cence can be treated without careful consideration of the whole problem of sex. In the vast literature upon this subject, the biologists have hitherto treated almost exclusively the anatomy and embryology of sex and its physiology in the lower forms of life, and have had little to say concerning its function in man. The alienists have given us a most painful though scien- tifically precious body of facts concerning perversions, but no competent writer among them has seriously considered their origin, and the best of them hardly mention puberty or adoles- cence, while writers on this topic, like Clouston and Marro, 1 G. Loisel (Rev. Scientifique, May 30, 1903), in an interesting article on sex- uality, attempts to differentiate four different groups or evolutionary stages of sex- ual qualities: First, those that accompany the act of fecundation and which are very early both in ontogenesis and phylogenesis like the glands and organs, in- cluding those of prehension, of which he enumerates twenty-three; secondly, traits that prepare for this act which appear later and sometimes disappear with the sexual period, like pigmentation, organs of locomotion, differences in strength and size, horns, spurs, teeth, song, odors, decorations, etc.; thirdly, those concerned with the eduction of the new being, which appear later yet, such as organs of ovi- position, nidification, somatic cavities, cutaneous formations, permanent or tran- sitory, various appendixes, those concerned with feeding the young — secretions, breasts, placenta, etc.; and fourthly, psychic and ethnologic traits having only a remote rapport with the above and arising only as a result of very accentuated sex- ual evolution, such as different habits of male and female, their varied conditions of life, modes of courtship, modesty, marriage, family, etc. Under these primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary groups, he believes, fall all important phe- HO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE have mostly limited themselves to the psycho-physiological as- pects of the age they treat with no attempt at larger coordina- tion. Ellis has so far confined himself mainly to a record of facts and opinions, and Scott,1 who has approached the sub- ject from the broadest standpoint, has written only a single monograph on the relations between sex and art. The cue given by Darwin's treatment of sexual selection as the chief factor in the descent of man must first be followed, and we may well invoke Plato's Diatoma to be our guide in this, per- haps the largest, most complex, yet most interesting and most important of all human themes. Geddes and Thompson 2 state that " the number of speculations as to the nature of sex has been well-nigh doubled since Drelincourt in the last century brought together two hundred and sixty-two groundless hy- potheses." But, as Schleiermacher well says, sex ought to be endlessly studied, because it is the most endless of subjects.
We may begin by recalling the now familiar facts of or- ganic decorations in the mating season where, in the animal world, the appeal is directly intersexual, and not, as in the case of blossoms in sexual plants, through the medium of insects. From the latter up, seasonal sex decorations make the whole animal world beautiful even to man. Life overflows in bright colors, the products of health. Ocelli, combs, wattles, horns, erectile hairs, top-knots, lapettes, crests, bands, spots, nuptial plumage, and many extra appendages, indicating high blood pressure and increased tension of life, herald the spring-time awakening. The ibex, goat, and some apes, develop beards; the glow-worm emits its love light to signal a mate; scent glands are censers for the incense of love; organs of prehension and of warfare grow as their need arises; and musical instru- ments are developed in and on the body. Not only structure, but function, is evolved. In the mating season the air is filled with noises; insects tick or stridulate; birds drum, slur, and rattle, and if they live in the dense woods where bright plumage would be less effective, they are endowed with song. Almost every animal is vocal at its mating time, and birds pout, tumble, strut, balz, or dance, open their wings to show hidden charms