more widely irradiated, has more stimuli or more modes of ex- pression so that it readily becomes more and more independent in both sexes of any of the various forms and degrees of abla- tion. The motive of merely relieving organic pressure tends to degrade the act to its very lowest possible level, seen in mas- turbation; it also involves the most degrading view of woman, and ignores the fact of the necessity and high developmental power of control and of maintained sex tension.
So, too, chemical theories of sex like those of Joanny Roux 1 and several American writers, who base the instinct on proto- plasmic hunger, and often fitly represent it as mediated in man by the degenerate sense of smell, are utterly inadequate at least for human psychology. Indeed, in the lowest forms of life, nutritive and sexual needs have only remote analogies chiefly attractive to symbolists. Dominant as the function of germ cells is, especially in lower forms, man loves not only with the whole body and its every organ, but with the whole soul and its every faculty, and human love needs added rubrics above those in the animal world. So, too, the view that it has an exclusive region in the brain is at best very partial in view of all the evidence. Even the work of Moll and of Ellis, to whom we owe most, courageous and indefatigable as it is, deals so much with the undeveloped or perverted manifesta- tions of this instinct that their theories, luminous and highly suggestive as they are, seem so far too somatic, and therefore partial and inadequate, to explain the higher and normal mani- festations of love. As the popular mind tends to become vio- lent and extreme about this subject, so men of science still in- cline to remote, speculative views which, while useful as protests against narrow and crude ideas, are still inadequate to explain " the greatest thing in the world." Possibly sex will never be regulated solely in the interests of reproduction ac- cording to the best attainable knowledge. Certainly the sects, colonies, and individuals who have so far sought to do so have attained neither stirpicultural results of value nor knowledge that gives them scientific respectability. Turgescence and its provocatives, discharge and its intense sensations, and flaccidity and all its psychic correlates of reaction, whether apathetic or 1 Psychologic de 1'Instinct Sexuel. Paris, 1899.
I42 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE violent, are the most convenient handles yet found for the vast masses of phenomena involved, but the greatest need, both practical and scientific, can be met only when higher and wider irradiations of these three processes, especially the first, are more clearly traced in their relations to the general conduct of life and mind, to religion, art, and esthetics, and even to scien- tific activity. While it is no part of our purpose here to discuss general theories of sex in detail, we may at least record a grow- ing and already irresistible conviction that great and hitherto unsuspected light is to be shed upon the genetic psychology of all these fields by the new studies of sex now so well advanced. Till then, while we may breed cattle, we can not breed men.
About this great theme, despite the precious new glimpses and the wide mobilization toward the great advances in knowl- edge of it that seem to impend, no one can feel more painfully than I the inadequacy of such rude attempts as the above to delineate a standpoint which, from the nature of the case, can not yet entirely transcend the realm of crude allegory and meta- phor. One might parody life as a stream from high mountain ranges which wring it from the clouds, coursing down through all the manifold ways in which the water comes down at Lodore to the sea of eternity. Adolescence is the chief rapids in this river of life which may cut a deep canon and leave its shores a desert. Educational methods, from those of the statesman and the religious founder to those of the artist and man of sci- ence, and even the pedagogue, are hydrographic engineering which builds a series of well-located and well-devised dams to irrigate wide arid areas or turn the mills of life, or that its floods be stored up against drought and need, so that nothing is lost. Seepage is the waste of licensed vice in otherwise happy families or prosperous civilizations. The rich alluvium of cus- tom and tradition, once rank with a life now gone and forgotten, is the soil or mold from the broad acreage of which culture in all its departments and the most precious values of life grow toward a harvest. Marshes are formed of the rich body of myth and custom, like the coal-measures from which higher utilities may be extracted. Alkaline dead sea plains of phallic detritus may be deposited. The village teacher is like the small farmer in Utah, who carefully turns his tiny pipe- ADOLESCENT LOVE 143 stem supply of water from one hill or row in his garden to another. Youthful dissipation is the wreckage of a spring freshet which wears away the dams, makes deep gullies, and may restore the primitive desert. The progressive prolonga- tion of old age by all the methods of modern hygiene and regi- men is a system of dikes, which rescues land from the primitive sea wherein man can take the pleasure, Faust thought supreme, of seeing growth. This fable suggests, despite its incoherence and partiality, the practical implications of this theory of sex.
CHAPTER XII ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE AND A NEW EDUCATION IN SCIENCE IN SCIENCE Nature a new world at adolescence, and love of nature as the basis of art, literature, religion, and science — The age of symbolism, allegory — The old philosophy of nature and the Latin feeling — Ages of conventionality — Dangers of premature nomenclature and mathematics — Study of structure without function — Youth the humanistic stage of science — Logical versus genetic order — A new renais- sance of liberal education in nature-study — The present elimination of a pre- cious late stage of psychic development — Geography as an enemy of science — Method of determining the genetic order — A few basic principles only estab- lished yet — The place of utilities and application of science — The status of high school physics as one illustration of blindness to genetic laws — How to rescue it from present decadence — The stage of the nature religions and their present practical significance — Adolescent changes of feeling for (i) boundless space and time, (2) the stars, (3) the sun and light and darkness, (4) the moon, (5) clouds, (6) wind and air, (7) heat and cold, (8) sea and water, (g) rocks and stones, ( i o) flowers, (u) trees, (12) animals — The relation in all these fields between science and poetry, myth and religion, and educational utilization and psychogenetic inferences.
OF all the changes normal at adolescence, none are more comprehensive and perhaps none are now more typical of the psychic transformation of this age than those that occur in the attitude toward the various aspects of nature. Before, these are naively learned, pragmatically accepted, and animistically inter- preted, for life and especially its sentient forms are best known and most interesting and so give apperceptive norms for all that is inanimate. The domain of law is limited and superstition flourishes. But when the ephebic sun dawns and the springs of a maturer mental life flow, the old world begins to seem strange and new. What things seem is not all of them, but there is something more behind and other meanings strive to reveal themselves. It was from this auroral state of mind, I ween, that the term natura, " the about to be born," arose. There is a new expectancy that her Memnonian lips will open and the heart begins to hum the only song of ancient Horus, ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE *45 " Hush, all hush, and see." We have known the countenance, but would now know the soul of the great all-mother. Every- thing is pregnant, and things about us seem to fairly cry out for some higher explanation. Phenomena are a veil to a great mystery, like a curtain to be rung up. Youth feels itself mov- ing about in a world unrealized. Perhaps the problem of the great Autos rests on some with a weight that is oppressive. Will the sphinx lips never open and tell the riddle of existence, or will it destroy us and reck not that we suffer and die? It is the age of brooding, and the normal courageous soul will not be baffled nor fall back, but will find or make answers — if only the echoes of its own questions.
The new life is first born in the heart, and is more or less unconscious, and among its first spontaneous creations are metaphors that may fade and be often recreated, so that lan- guage itself becomes fossil poetry. Allegory gives things a dual meaning; symbolism is now first possible, and a widening circle of objects and events acquire a new purport; light, cloud, wave, fountain, ivy, laurel, palm, heat, and scores of objects are no longer mere things of sense, but are words in the dic- tionary of psychic states and moral qualities. If myths remain, they are given new contexts and transformed and ennobled by higher uses. Thus prose is often now transmuted into poetry. In this way the old that had concealed now reveals the new, if growth is continuous, and thus the soul is nourished in ways that often seem mystical, as many species of fish subsist on invisible food. Thus every aspect and thing in nature has somewhere and by some race been an object of perhaps supreme worship. The traces of these old idolatries are still found in the oozes of sentiment in the depths of the soul, which, like the sea-bed oozes, are not inorganic but the sedimentary products of extinct forms of life. In the soul, too (though not in the sea, for here the analogy fails), these are not only residual but have a protoplasmal promise and potency of a larger and fuller life for modern youth. Love and enthusiasm for nature, if it is ever to arise, is now in order, and the open secret may seem ever slipping away, but revelation, although slow, is sure, because it comes by growth and does not depend upon the solutions of specific problems. All this is copiously illustrated in Chapter VIII.
146 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE How basal and all-conditioning the love of nature is for all that is best in the soul of youth the world has probably never begun to realize. Biography shows how nearly all the great creators of physical science — the greatest achievement of man in the world so far — have first been passionate lovers of nature in their chosen field, and that this has been their initial impulsion. The artist must first see with the heart. Ruskin never wearies in preaching this lesson; while Vachon's vo- luminous report on the state of art in Europe by countries essentially agrees with the unknown author of Rembrandt als Erzieher in two conclusions: first, that the best artists are those who conserve most completely into maturity and old age the sentiments and ideas of youth at its prime; and, secondly, that most who attain the highest real success are those whose inspiration was given by the environment in which the most susceptible years of youth were passed, and who have succeeded in expressing most adequately and completely its responses to nature. The same holds in general of the early history of every literature that developed from an indigenous origin, for its first monuments are of personified objects or forces of nature. Again, religion sprung from nature, and to a great extent thrives and languishes with love or indifference to nature. Max Muller counts some three thousand Aryan nature gods. After profuse polytheistic deification of nature, mono- theism was aided by the idea of one all-covering vault of heaven, which gave us a uni-verse, and pantheism is but the culmination of the religion of nature. There is no such muse and no such inspiration. Our brain, her mouthpiece, which she created and in which she mirrors herself in consciousness, al- though it can do nothing else but interpret her, tells but a part of her, and she herself in turn reveals but a part of absolute being; so there must always be residual mystery and miracle, demanding myth hypotheses and assumptions, shading down to blank nescience. Hence youth must always be asked — writh no whit less solemnity than the pulpit puts the solemn question, " Do you love God? " — Do you really love nature, or will you remain strangers and aliens to her mighty heart? Taste and see that she is purest, truest, noblest. We sprung from her bosom and inherit vastly more than we ever dreamed of her wisdom, and to her all that is mortal of us will return.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 1 47 In affliction and calamity, when conscious purpose and en- deavor fail, we can sink back into her arms, and when creeds and philosophies fade we know that if " our bark sink,?tis to her larger sea." She is all law and no chaos, life abounds wherever life is possible, good-will is there because the best and not the worst survive, and youth is in a peculiar sense the consummate flower of nature, more worthy than anything else on earth, of love, reverence, and devoted service.1 Zeller finds the germ of the ancient Roman religion in the Latin-Sabine veneration of invisible spiritual beings in nature; the solitude and gloom of the forest, the gurgling of springs, the crackling and leaping of flames, sky phenomena and the seasons — all these suggested three classes of natural forces, heavenly, terrestrial, and subterranean, which were poetically personified as gods, instead of scientifically interpreted. The transition from these conceptions to matured ethical religion can nowhere be so fully studied as among the Romans, the most superstitious of all civilized races, whose fundamental characteristic was awe of unknown forces and constraint before supernatural influences.2 The German idealistic philosophy of nature by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel was haunted by this old sense of the divinity of nature and of the pregnancy, closeness to origins, many-sidedness, vitality, and infinite elasticity of muthos, which by the Tubingen school was made no less orphic and pervaded by a sense of the spirituality of the world than the logos doctrines. There was a rich old feeling that nature was God's body and He its soul, that it is all one great apocalypse. There were impulses from the vernal woods, communion with the anima mundi that " lives through all life, and extends through all extent," and a deep belief that the soul gathers in wisdom by intuition and beauty by silent sympathy. The teacher of any science who feels this will forever arouse en- thusiasm, and he who does not, works on the surfaces and 1 See M. A. Hoyt: Love of Nature; or, The Root of Teaching and Learning the Sciences; Fed. Sem., vol. iii, pp. 61-86. Biese: Entwickelung des Naturge- fiihls bei den Griechen und Romern; Kiel, 1882, p. 210. Im Mittelalter u. in der Neuzeit, 1888, p. 460. Also P. Lefebre: La Religion, Paris, 1892.
8 See my article on Edward Zeller, in Contemporary Psychologists, Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1891, vol. iv, pp. 156-175.
148 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE not in the depths of the pupil's soul, while he who vilipends the sentiment that underlies his department, no matter how learned or pedagogically gifted he be, robs the soul of far more than he gives it.
Only those who have studied the history of poetry in this regard realize how remote from nature it sometimes becomes through a whole period of its development; how conventional its treatment of natural objects; how tawdry its diction; how inaccurate its descriptions; and how slender its stock in trade of real knowledge under the combined influence of city life and utility. Many an otherwise reputable English poet in the period somewhat preceding Wordsworth manifested only a feeble color sense, and wrote as if all above was blue and all below green. The ocean was simply vast, solitary, awful, and it had to wait for Turner, Byron, Shelley. Things that could be smelled and which were fit for poetry hardly needed more than the words fragrance and perfume. Birds were a feath- ered choir; the nightingale, and perhaps the cuckoo, lark, raven, eagle, and peacock, were all the birds in the poet's muniment chamber. The brook simply babbled and meandered, and did little more. The night was incidentally invoked for the sake of the moon, and perhaps of the stars. The flowery mead, with now and then a little progress from the general toward the specific, the old or strong oak, whispering poplar, and perhaps a few other trees, quite sufficed, and these faint echoes of the old pastoral idyl were almost as conventionalized as Chinese art. Thus it was an important and a very difficult step to break the poetic canons or unwritten traditions and really get out of doors; to travel, paint, read and write fiction; and this was at first with a real but pallid joy like that of a convales- cent's first glimpse of spring.1 The modern pedagogy of science is threatened with a simi- lar alienation from the love of nature. This is seen in three respects: i. Technical nomenclature which attaches classical names to objects is often thought the beginning of science. It brings order and makes classification possible. It is so copi- ous that it fills dictionaries, and so far exhausts ancient lan- 1 The Treatment of Nature and English Poetry in Literature. M. Reynolds.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 1 49 guages that to know this part of botany and zoology alone would itself involve mastery of scores of thousands of Greek and Latin words. This is much more than the average bache- lor of arts in these tongues commands, and it is now often used as an argument for classical study. This is, in a sense, the vocabulary of some sciences and therefore it is often made to bear the chief introductory stress, so that the youth who would study nature must first serve an apprenticeship in the workshop of ancient philosophy and etymology. 2. Mathe- matics is the language of other sciences which become com- plete only just so far as their body of truth can be expressed in numbers and equations. Tables of constants and formulae of calculus that show how God himself geometrizes have been so inspiring that mathematical methods have often been applied prematurely in fields no*t ripe for such treatment, so that the history not only of science but of speculation is strewn with the wreckage of such abortive efforts because men have for- gotten Aristotle's precept, that it is only affectation to try to treat a subject more exactly than its nature permits. All this has its place, and its invaluable and imposing methodology and its inspiring ideals have given momentum to many of the most important advances. 3. Morphology, the exact and com- parative study of parts of organs, accurate perception, memory, drawing of forms, the paralleling and homologizing of struc- tures of higher species, the anatomizing of even microscopic objects, almost constitute a number of sciences themselves.
Without these, modern science could not do its work in the world nor hardly exist. But we do not realize, least of all do college-makers of high school text-books, that there is a standpoint in the teens from which this is not even needful alloy to give the precious metal of truth currency, but simply dross and tarnish. Such formulas disinfect the soul of interest and dehumanize nature. They are just as much and just as truly weeds to the boy as his mythopoetic sentiments for nature are to the drill-master. The pupil is farther from understand- ing the specialist professor than from sympathizing with Keats, who in a toast proposed perdition to Newton, who had de- graded the rainbow by making it a mere matter of prisms, or with Walt Whitman in the poem, where he " had heard the learned astronomer lecture," etc., till his brain was so fatigued 15° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE by ideation and technique that he had to rush out to seek rest and refuge, and reassure himself by lying on the grass and gazing up at the moon and starry skies. Humboldt thought love of landscapes and landscape-painting had much to do with generating love of geography and natural science, arid our returns show how keen this rivalry between science and senti- ment often is at this stage of life. The stories of Jeffries, Deleal, and many others in Chapter VIII, also teach the same open secret. One might almost think that a love of solitude with nature was a good index of mental ability, showing a mind capable of entertaining itself and generating love of nature, which is the best basis of love of science, later, if only the pedagogue can develop and not alienate and disenchant. The gnarled and dozy technical roots if they do not act as switchbacks are liable to transform a participator in nature, fronting the essentials of life in her presence, into an indifferent spectator, and to make the child of nature's household only a guest. The spirit of botany is where flowers grow, geology in the fields and not in the mineralogical cabinet with petrog- raphy, and that of astronomy is in the silence of the open night alone.
Thus my chief thesis here is that in early adolescence not only girls, but boys, normally approach any and every branch of science over the same road which the race traversed in a prescientific age. There should be a humanistic propaedeutic because youth is in the humanist stage. Nature is sentiment before it becomes idea or formula or utility. The chief among many reasons why all branches of science are so disappointing to their promoters in high school and college is, that in the exact logical, technical way they are taught, they violate the basal law of psychic growth, ignore the deep springs of natural interest, and attempt to force a precocity against which the instincts of the young, so much wiser and truer and older than their consciousness, happily revolt. The statistics of progress- ive school decadence in science show how the laws of psychic growth, although too subtle for science to see, are too strong for its best endeavors to overcome. It is the logical order before its time making havoc with the genetic order. The little sci- ence taug-ht is no compensation for the ruin and desolation wrought in the feelings for nature and nature's God, which are about the best things in this best age of the soul. Those ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 15 1 who, like the present writer, would see the sciences given the foremost place, are most inconsolable in view of the pathos of their present educational status.
The precious last stages of growth are ignored and elim- inated. Race history and the nature of youth demand that science should be taught at first in a large, all-comprehensive way, not without a distinctly religious spirit, reopening the half-obscured but broad road by which man passes from nature to nature's God. We must have an introduction to science that touches rather lightly on nearly all the great hypotheses, fron- tier questions, and larger syntheses over the whole field, in a way that the modern specialist wots not of, that is unitary and synthetic and non-analytic, that commands and compares the great ethnic mythophemes, that is poetic and historical and orienting; then we sh^ll realize here a higher meaning of the two best designations of education, now so often degraded and misapplied, in the literary and philological fields where they were once inculcated, humanistic and liberal, and usher in a new renaissance by bringing youth and nature together as they belong. There is all the more need of this because, as a later chapter shows, even literature and language are rapidly ceasing to be humanistic. Such a course will be an ally and not a para- site of science. It will be as different from our full-grown geographies as a living serpent, the symbol of wisdom, is from a sausage. This subject as now taught is one of the chief ob- stacles in the true way of approaching the study of the cosmos. Its topics are disconnected or associated on the low plane of juxtaposition in space. It ignores nothing but its own history. As Turkey represents a past stage of development once threat- ening to overrun the West, but is now the shrunken sick man of Europe, so school geography is an amorphous remnant of the old cosmology from which many sciences have split off. This text-book maker's pet and pedagogue's abomination often has all the defects charged against popular science without its saving quality of being made by experts, and dilutes and dif- fuses itself over the entire universe, from stars to geology, crops, politics, history, anthropology, manufacture, mining, commerce — fields that geographical societies know not of.1