unfailingly reach the region of the sexual life." " At the bot- tom of every case of hysteria, and reproducible by an analytic effort after even an interval of ten years, may be found one or more facts of previous sexual experience belonging to early youth." " I regard this important result as the discovery of a caput Nili of neuropathology." This view, although no doubt 1 Brauer and Freud, op. cit. *Wien. klin. Rundschau, 1896.
122 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE partial and less completely explanatory of all hysterical phe- nomena, brings it back, nevertheless, to its etymology, and is suggestive here not only in showing the wide psychic and also somatic resonance of this function, but in confirming our con- tention that primary sexual facts normally come in the later stages of adolescence after secondary qualities have become familiar to consciousness. To my thinking, we have in the above theory a new outcrop of the old problems of catharsis, which is suggested in Plato's Symposium, elaborated in Aris- totle's Poetics, and voluminously discussed ever since (Boring mentions seventy treatises on it in fifteen years), and which is destined to be one of the most fundamental themes in the new psychology of art, and perhaps still more of religion.
Now love can include the whole body and soul. The fact that, as we have seen, woman is a more generic being than man, closer to the race, and less mutilated by specializations or by deformities of body or of soul, makes it easy and normal for man to see in his chosen Helen the entire sex. She becomes to him the flower in the crannied wall, by knowing and loving which he knows God and man. Every part of her body and mind is attractive. He must not be unable to see her coun- tenance for her soul, or her soul for her body, and will find in her a complete microcosm so that age and beauty are not in- compatible, and his love for soma and psyche will each keep the other from atrophy. Marriage can now be ideal, infallible, and impeccable without requiring any platonic supervision of elders. The erogenic magnets are organized so that a life of true love can be both complemental and symbiotic. Synthesis of the many complex elements now secures against any form of degradation; each sex is conscious of its own good points, but still more so of those of the other; life, which has hitherto been partial, provisional, and preparatory, now becomes com- plete in mutual, spiritual appropriation and mastery. Defects are balanced, and two bodies and two souls are a finished nidus for the development of the new resultant life which can now be inaugurated.
Every gemmule is mobilized and the sacred hour of hered- ity normally comes when adolescence is complete in wedlock and the cerebro-spinal rings up the sympathetic system, and this hands over the reins to the biophores and germ cells, which ADOLESCENT LOVE 123 now assert their dominance over those of the soma. In the most unitary of all acts, which is the epitome and pleroma of life, we have the most intense of all affirmations of the will to live and realize that the only true God is love, and the center of life is worship. Every part of mind and body participates in a true pangenesis. This sacrament is the annunciation hour, with hosannas which the whole world reflects. Communion is fusion and beatitude. It is the supreme hedonic narcosis, a holy intoxication, the chief ecstasy, because the most intense of experiences; it is the very heart of psychology, and because it is the supreme pleasure of life it is the eternal basis and guarantee of optimism. It is this experience more than any other that opens to man the ideal world. Now the race is in- carnated in the individual and remembers its lost paradise. Man must experience pleasure in order to know the good, and the long reverberations of this experience remain, transporting the soul, filling it with a sense of exquisite rapture, delicacy, and deep joy, hovering over life and suffusing it with a glory not hitherto suspected, enriching the past like a " vague snatch of Uranian antiphone," and lighting the future with the permanent possibility of a higher life than could hitherto be con- ceived. Life is now polarized, oriented, and potentialized. The soul is filled with a Titanism that would achieve a vita nuova upon a higher plateau, where the music of humanity is no longer sad but triumphant. The conversion of the Marquis of Penalta, by the act of love, from a monk to a hero of action, as the first taste of blood transforms a young tiger, illustrates how this act can never be normally passionate unless it is pure. Now the soul realizes the possibility of a new heaven and a new earth; that the highest dreams of human beatitude may be real; that there is a summum bonum awaiting man on heights not yet scaled, and that erethism and its calentures are prophecies of a higher human estate. It pants for more and fuller life. Nothing is such a potent norm, so pervades all the conscious and unconscious regions with a controlling force, which science can not describe and which is forever too subtle for the intellect, which is a more individual product, to trace. Every goal that science, art, religion, ambition strives for becomes more real and near, and in no other act are body and soul so absolutely one, and the rights and fullest functions of each so utterly 124 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE dependent upon those of the other. The flesh and spirit are mated, and now for the first time an apperception organ is molted forth, full grown like Minerva for knowing, doing, and feeling all that is lawful to man's estate. Nature, as hitherto conceived, is transcended in the soul's natura naturata, and the extra and supernatural organ of faith comes into possession of its kingdom.
Alas for those in whom this experience is mutilated by pre- mature or excessive experience in Venusberg, for these can never know the highest, largest, and deepest things of life! Genesic excess, venery, and salacity arrest the higher develop- ment, forever exclude the soul from the higher kingdom of man and compel it to dwell in lower regions, where adolescence merges into senescence too early and without normal culmina- tion. Synthesis on the psychic side and amphimixis on the physical issues in offspring in variation, in the interests of which sex was developed. The effectiveness of the rejuvenation thus arising in the new generation is a moral as well as a physiolog- ical biometer, or test of life, every act of which should be con- formable to the needs of the unborn, that an enfeebled exist- ence be not transmitted to them, but that the sacred torch be passed on undimmed. Many a mystery of human existence is only the dim forecourt to this great clarifier. As Heraclitus thought the sun each night was absorbed into the earth, mak- ing all its mass a little warmer and lighter, and secreted anew each morning; as the sun explains many a mythic cycle of solar heroes and brings both them and the mind into a higher unity, so the high potential of sex pervades and gives us the key by which to unlock many obscurities. When chaste and ripened love is thus, each personality is a god to the other and every such conception is immaculate for both.
Reproduction is always sacrificial. Man learns to live by dying and his life is at best a masterly retreat. Relaxation and detumescence are the first faint symptoms from afar of senile involution and the Nemesis of death, toward which the indi- vidual shrivels. After the high tide in which the ars amandi culminates, lifting existence, like the great bore on the Chinese rivers, the law of post coitus triste is gradually accentuated with increasing age. Now man truly knows good and evil, euphoria and disphoria, and is polarized to pleasure and pain. Hereafter ADOLESCENT LOVE 125 ADOLESCENT LOVE 125 Nature grows more and more indifferent to the individual, for the species is his true essence and its life is an explanation and paraphrase of sex. In natures weakened by venery, indif- ference and impotence deepen to remorse and sometimes to psychic pain so intense that the fall of man is reenacted and hate and even murder may take the place of love. Pleasure at any price means a loveless life from which all the music of humanity has gone. If it is hollow or diseased at the core, even pleasure is only explosive and instantaneous, and the trough of the wave of reaction is too deep and broad. This sex- ual cause of neurasthenia, " in the morning hectic, in the even- ing electric," makes life a living death, for all sin either is or is measured by the degradation of this function.
The soul of the normal mother now slowly turns toward the child and toward the ftiture, and the father, whom she original- ly reclaimed from feral, roving loves, later follows. Marital is enlarged to filial love, and the affections are slowly pivoted over into alinement with the race and its interests. The struggle for the life of others, which has taken the place of that for individual existence, now includes the family and is triune. Childhood is studied by sympathy through all stages of the miracle of growth. In the lower animal series, parents die in the exercise of the reproductive function. Many animal mothers never see their children, who are orphaned before birth, but now womb, cradle, nursery, home, family, relatives, school, church, and state are only a series of larger cradles or placenta, as the soul, like the chambered nautilus, builds itself larger mansions, the only test and virtue of which is their service in bringing the youth to ever fuller maturity.
Wedlock and the family are thus all conditioning. They must be perfect because they are symbols and types of life. These masterpieces are the choicest products, so far as evolution is yet itself evolved, of the history of the world, which is at root a love story. Defect here destroys an organ of knowledge, for the larger institutions are created in its image and can be rightly known only through it. Without children, love is in- complete. If woman is not satisfied, and grows mannish and assumes the functions of the other sex as her rights, it is be- cause man is a failure and has not met her highest needs of body and soul, or both; and if he degenerates, and either be- 126 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE comes feminine or relapses to his predomesticated stage and ceases to be primarily husband, it is because she no longer is primarily wife and mother. That religion and sex are in close psychological relation the world knows well. This is seen even in their abnormalities and in the acute attunement of the adolescent soul to the former. This stage of life is the accepted time when the teachers of all faiths have found their chief op- portunity, as appears at length in another chapter. Christianity has exercised its salvatory and soteriological power in the world because it rescued love by deploying it upon a higher plane and building a temple where vice makes a sewer. It is this upon which the claims of Christianity chiefly rest. It is this that makes the Jewish-Christian story, and it affects the very heart of human history, the record of the supreme achievement of our race thus far, and our Bible its pedagogic masterpiece.
V. The chief reason why our Bible is the best of all ethnic Bibles is because it is so deeply based upon genetic truth. The story of creation is full of ancient and subtle symbols of divine generation. The tale of Eden and the fall, whatever historical validity it may or may not have, is a masterly allegory of the first stage in the decadence of love. Abraham, a nomad sheik, was a breeder of cattle, and the promise was that he should be a breeder of men like the stars of the heavens for multitude. Circumcision was a hygienic measure of great efficacy, as we shall see, as well as a covenant. The long wars with the Canaanites and Baal worshipers were conflicts with phallicism, to the gross orgies of which the chosen people were always lapsing. All early Hebrew history shows that while man knows how to breed cattle, Jehovah could breed men, and it is a study of human heredity far more effective than Plato knew how to make it. The New Testament begins with the annun- ciation and conception from on high, and a nursery scene of moving bucolic power, while Islam hypostatizes only the for- mer. We glimpse the hero, at the dawn of puberty, in the temple, turning, as is germane to gifted souls at this stage, to the great themes of religion. One at least of his temptations was probably fleshly, but gloriously overcome. He dies at the acme of prolonged adolescence, nubility, and ideal perfec- tion. Motherhood is idealized in the adoration of Mary, who has lost none of the charm of virginity, but combines the two ADOLESCENT LOVE 127 into unique glory. God is our Father and heavenly Parent, and the Gospel is through and through a literal deification of love as the chief thing in the world. Paul's teaching culminates in his enthronement of charity, which is love fulfilling all the law. Celibacy and asceticism were long thought the Christian service most ad major em Dei gloriam. The logos or spirit of wisdom, which made the world, was spermatic; all the doctrines of conversion and customs of confirmation are prefigured in the nature and the needs of adolescence. Liturgies are full of adoration and passionate declarations of love to God. Thus the great work of Jesus was, when all else save love alone was dead, to create the world from this vital germ.
Psychologically, religion and love rise and degenerate to- gether. One test of an age, race, or civilization is to keep these two as near as k)ve and death are to each other, and in as wholesome relations. Schleiermacher deduces theology and religion alike from a sense of absolute dependence, which al- most suggests Massochistic longings toward the transcendent. The same erethic diathesis appears in Swedenborg, to whom, after the severest conflicts with lust, heaven opened with hedonic raptures as epiphanies have often come to saints who abandon themselves to heaven. We must love God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength, because he can only be known by love and not by arguments from design or sufficient reason or cause, and if we do so aright we shall not make him a love fetish or idol, a transcendent or extraneous personality, nor shall we approach him with phallic ecstasy or parusia mania or many of the arts of pious eroticism, but we shall real- ize that he is the most immanent of all things, and that the higher monotheism is not altogether separable from the higher pantheism. We shall not love him on Sundays only, or in dreams apart from life as sexual love is narrowed to fetishistic perversion, but by a life like Abou ben Adhem's, devoted to the service of the race, that great Being the lightest whisper from whose soul " moves us more than all the ranged reason of the world." Because he is love, love only can know its own. Prayer will not be a ceremonial ritual, adulation, or petition, but simply approximation and desire, on the principle that " he prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small." Miracle will no longer be a term reserved for a series of facts J28 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE choicely isolated from organic connection with nature or life, but will be best seen in the wonder and awe felt for all nature and perhaps especially for growth, while revelation will be truth cherished with irresistible conviction as its criterion. All longings for immortality will not be satisfied with the per- petuation of the shell of our selfish selves, but will focus on our immortal race as its true and proper object, with the larger perspective of all being in the background.
In the later sections of his ethics, the God-intoxicated Spinoza characterizes the intellectual love of his pantheistic God, which is simply nature known sub specie eternitatis, as giving freedom, salvation, blessedness, joy, and immortality, and which can only be known by love. For all ontological Minnesingers of the love of God, it is eternal life to know him. Philosophy is a noetic Eros or impulse of the soul to return to its preexistent state, of which all things mortal remind it. It is the passion for general ideas, but because these transcend all particulate existence it is the contemplation of death or a real Thanatopsis, and death, as the counterpart of love which never seems so black as when contrasted with it, has been the great stimulus to thought. Thus the heart makes the theologian, and if its impulses are strong and good, must impel him to some- times believe the absurd just in proportion as his heart trans- cends his head, and is a more adequate organ of response to the universe. The supernatural in religion, therefore, is the homo- logue of the idealization of the mistress in whom, despite her defects, the lover sees all perfection. As the soul of the rapt Yogi reaches the mystic On and hovers on the edge of absorption and the extinction of personality, he may pause and hark back for a moment only at the call of love. All else per- ishes, but it endures, for love in the Sanskrit hymnology is the spring of mind, and without it all things are as a root out of dry ground.
Jesus was the consummate artist in this field, for he with- stood the contemplative passion which has irradiated so much of the best human motive power in the world into the inane infinite, and addressed himself to what we so sadly now need again in terms less fossilized by convention, the reincarnation of love. It is reassuring to find that what either the individual or the race originated at an age when the feelings and instincts ADOLESCENT LOVE 1*9 are strongest and the intellect is undeveloped is reaffirmed by the latter when it comes to its full flower; that if fashions in orthodoxies change, it is because all these are stagings which must always be slowly changed or demolished as the great spiritual temple of religion is being reared in the heart. Our scripture will itself be regenerated and re-revealed as the record of man's highest insights into the meaning, and his most prac- tical utilization of his own life, which far transcends anything known to modern psychology and ethics, and all chiefly because it recognized love as the central powrer in the soul and presented both patterns and precepts how, instead of a way of death, it could open up a way of life.
VI. The fact that love sensitizes the soul to the influences of nature makes it a genetic factor in the evolution of art, liter- ature, natural religion, 'and perhaps to some extent of science. The lover is moved not only by his mistress's form, features, and every act, but associates her with a larger environment, almost every item of which may reflect her to his fancy, senti- ment, or both. He is at the mercy of the weather. She may be cold and chill as death, while he is burning or melting in a flame with his blood lava, or alternating from the torrid to the frigid zone of passion, while climate and environment in poetry and romance are always propitious, and the effects of nature are increased by the descending series of her absence, refusal, or death. The lovesick swain borrows the poet's heart and brain, or the artist's eye and hand. In four hundred love poems and songs, aquatic phenomena and metaphors abound. His heart sings of her as the shell ever murmurs of the sea. His passion, or her breast, ebbs and flows like the tides. Its waves break and burst like billows upon the shore. He would live in an ocean of love, " as fishes tipple in the deep." Love draws him, while the ocean mirrors his ardors as it reflects the sky. He would glide with her over sunlit waves with sails of taffeta and masts of beaten gold, or, if disappointed, would settle into un- known depths where old Silenus sank. Lovers' suicides are often by drowning. The holy water of affection laves the soul and stills its thirst. The course of love runs like a river be- tween flowery banks or plunges over a cataract, for love is born out of and came up from the sea.
The lover is in special rapport with the winds that grieve, 13° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE sigh, and murmur. The zephyrs whisper to him of his absent love, the gales from the south are amorous, and the very air in which he gasps is wanton or lovesick. Fourteen per cent of three hundred and forty youths and maidens confessed, in a questionnaire, that the moon always made them want to see their beau or girl. It is invoked to pity those who love in vain, to carry messages, and has heard the confessions of wan and moonsick languishers in love since life was cadenced to its monthly rhythm. The sun burns with the heat of love, and though there is no day till Gloriana awakes, it looks dull when she appears, or when he " opes his golden eye " the light from hers " misleads the morn." Love would be not only blind but aphasic without flowers, the language of which is the signa- ture of its diverse and myrionomous phases. The aspen, poppy, willow, violet, forget-me-not, lily, hyacinth, jessamine, eglantine, asphodel, amaranth, harebell, anemone, are states of mind, and the laureate of love is a fool in its college without the folk-lore of flowers, in terms of which all the incidents of courtship can be symbolically told. Philomel with her lyre of gold, the lark that " clinks its golden anvil at heaven's gate," the bulbul, the boding raven, and the amorous descant of es- pousals by a numerous choir of feathered songsters are another important element in the stock vocabulary of the lover. In- deed, everything in nature responds. The sky is deep and cerulean like her eyes, pure as her heart, high as her purpose. Night, stars, storm, lightning, moldering earth, grot and dell, sand and grave, rock and all the precious stones and a copious fauna and flora, both real and imaginary, are ministers of love. Landscapes are vestiges of ancient love scenes which, until recent times, were out-of-doors and in the country, the con- ventionalities of which make us recognize the sentiment in its stage setting before the lovers appear. When she has gone, " idolatrous fancy sanctifies her relics." All things " mind me of my Jean," and respond by a unique animism, the psychology of which has not yet been treated, to the lover's call for sym- pathy. They are his valentines, and the sounds of nature have