etherism from which all things emanated and into which they will be reabsorbed. It would almost seem that pantheistic, like other religious impulses, culminated in youth in which the best blood of its highest types flows. It is not critically formulated or entirely conscious, but the appetency for uncreated and un- determined being, for a Godhood above God, for bottoming on some most real being or substance as if the summit of the scale of existence was attained with the highest degree of abstrac- tion, is perhaps the supreme expression of the religion of pure intellect, which must forever be a very different thing in its nature and needs from the religion of the heart which can never love a being defined by negation, can not worship an unmoved mover, and is not intoxicated with abstract unity. Or is it all because the work of reason itself is not complete until it has postulated something ultra rational or brought itself squarely up against barriers which thought can never cross, and thus in a sense shown forth its own transcendent nature even by affirming the dissolution of personality in a universal and un- conditioned menstruum, pausing before a veil which only the heart can penetrate?
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 163 The new ephebic sympathy with nature in these days of evolution and cosmic gas passes far more rapidly than formerly into an Oriental sense of a one and all, which is a unity back of all difference, conceived as a point of departure from which we were formed out of the void, and into which, when the tides that drew us forth ebb again, we shall be resolved or absorbed. As by the old doctrine of representative perception the heart perceives objects because it is of the same kind, since like knows like, so it is felt that the soul is of the same nature as all, and can therefore know all. These sentiments are in fact not yet pantheism, because there is no conception of a soul of the world, and indeed there is at first neither dualism nor monism. It is not a system, but a feeling of kinship which is a kind of insight and which may later develop comprehension. At first it is an utterly naive and unreflecting sympathetic grop- ing or orientation with regard to origin and end of both self and the world, a sense of our continuity with life, earth, sun, and sky. It is true that this way lies pantheism, which Paulsen calls the secret faith of science to-day, in which perhaps all natural religions culminate. It is the sentiment which the Stoics interpreted materialistically, making their theology a part of physics; optimistically, because they thought the world and its soul the most perfect; and ethically, by defining duty as the contemplation and imitation of nature or the universe — but in its native youthful form it is most benign.
Thus, neither the narrowness of creed nor the bigotry of systems should lead us to forget that theologies and even phi- losophies pass, while folklore and poetry, that spring from and lie nearer the heart, remain, and that the weak points of the former often constitute their chief use. A shallow orthodoxy may condemn these youthful stirrings of soul, but they are not only not inconsistent with the highest religious or even Chris- tian belief and life, but profoundly strengthen it, so that their absence is a very serious loss. This experience makes purgation and is a precious baptism for which the now much vaunted epistemology is no adequate substitute; it gives a deep, abiding sense of reality instead of the hollowness which academic teaching so often leaves about the heart. It instils feelings that " there lives and moves a soul in all things, and that soul is God "; that " the rolling year is full of God; forth in the 1 64 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE spring his beauty walks"; that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being." It gives a kind of spiritual exaltation, so that every aspect of the cosmos may awaken the spirit of poetry, of which one of the best definitions is contact between the soul and nature. This sudden psychic expansion toward the infinite is almost the acme, and these phenomena the high- water mark of genius, which needs to see little in order to know so much, and which is temperamental and characteristic in the modern environment of true science in which it is " bliss to be alive and to be young is heaven." This is nature living, as it can truly only in our lives. It touches perhaps the very highest point yet attained in human evolution, where our source and destiny bend together to a cycle, and where we can with equal ease and equal edification interpret the highest things in the scale of development by the lowest, or the lowest by the highest.
II. Little children watch the stars pop out like bubbles, or take their places, " say present," think them diamonds, gold studs, brass nail-heads to keep up the sky, lamp's eyes, sparks, glass buttons. They love each other's company, and the happy celestial family, mothered by the moon or fathered by the sun, talk of us or of God. At about the age of ten, twinkling seems to attract special attention. It is explained as winking at each other in sign language, or at us, and children wink back; it is the breaking of bubbles, vibrations when they hit each other and shake, shooting out sparkles, rotation showing alternate light and dark sides, saying good evening, and they call back this greeting; it is dancing or else their smiles or tears. They often pick a certain star as " my star," wait for and salute it, and are sad or feel guilty if it does not appear. It is talked to, told secrets, used to wish by, and invested with peculiar power to make wishes come true, etc., will take the soul in personal charge at death; some move the bed or adjust curtains so it will shine on them when they go to sleep. Sometimes they are indi- vidualized as souls of parents, dead friends, great men, and many amuse themselves by tracing angles, circles, animals, persons, buildings, apparel. They cluster for sociability, etc.
At adolescence sentiment regarding them is greatly deep- ened. There are sometimes longings for some token of re- sponse, melting tenderness, partly love and partly worship.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 165 Some reveries are dependent upon stars and seem to free the mind from the body and send it off on charming excursions. Spontaneous prayers to stars are not infrequent. Maidens are sometimes greatly steadied by silent communion with the stars and lifted above trouble, because from their eternal standpoint earthly pleasure and pain seem evanescent. They bring calm- ness, purity, control. Occasionally young women become pas- sionate star lovers.1 The Milky Way is a heavenly river " with a broad, peaceful, stony bed." It is often conceived as flowing both ways, perhaps from the north pole, which was once nearer to it than now; or it is a fiery current, the storehouse of lightning, or its stream is the source of rain and flows alternately up and down.
We have here the ontogenic correlate of astrology and many an ancient myth* of stars and planetary influences. In- terest in stellar revolutions comes later and its phyletic side seems far stronger, this stage probably having been suppressed by the percolations of the influences of modern astronomy which are extirpating pre-Copernican ideas, great, long-persis- tent, and pervasive as they have been. The value of their edu- cational reconstructions may be an open question. I can here only indicate them in a note.2 1 A young mother still holds unspoken communion with stars and is helped by it in many ways. They lifted her thoughts far above all trouble. They were eternal, and from their standpoint all pleasure and pain seemed evanescent. They were constant, unchanging, and so mild and pure that to contemplate them kept her calm, pure in thought, sweet in temper, and brought self-control and a deep peace. For another, although reared in Puritan New England and still an active church member, the being called God had little interest or reality, as a child, less than Santa Claus, and was prayed to only perfunctorily and not as a power in her life. But the stars were passionately loved and could grant prayers. Because they had such power to arouse deep longings, they must have power to satisfy them, till matters of conscience were habitually and instinctively taken to them. Faith in the love of mother or sister is not more perfect than was girlish belief in the re- sponsive love of the stars, that drew so mysteriously yet strongly. What is prayed them for is still granted, and the awe and love still increases and they are looked to for right desire?.
2 An endless number of man's sacred ideas are based on a supreme reverence for the revolution of the universe about the earth's axis and for the power that causes this motion, a belief which since Copernicus we know to be false. The idea of this vast and constant revolution of the heavens around the earth must, from the time the human mind first took cognizance of it, have exerted an enormous fascination and influence upon the reflective and devout mind. An axletree or 1 66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Perhaps the most significant immediate effect of science here is to put the stars afar off. The youth reads in his text- book that if the sun were two feet in diameter, the earth would be the size of a pea two hundred and twenty feet away, and the nearest star would be eight thousand miles away. He reads of one hundred million stars visible through the three-foot glass of a telescope, or of the twenty-two thousand million, estimated, when a lens is made which can see those of the twentieth magnitude — the Lick glass reaching only the six- teenth; of the small size of our sun compared with Sirius about five hundred times greater, and others estimated to be a million times larger; of all the stages of stellar life from pole was early assumed, and some creative myths, like the Japanese, represent this spear-axis as churning the world out of the primeval sea. Hence we have a vast cycletic or kinetic mythology of cosmic machinery in motion.
When the awe-struck mind sought for the power that caused this rotation, it would naturally be placed at the highest pivotal point, so that the polar deity may be, as John O'Neill (The Night of the Gods, 2 vols., 1893) urges with great learn- ing, " the oldest and supremest of the cosmic gods of all the early northern regions." Here is the eye of heaven, and here the omphalos myths are located. Here, espe- cially, the seven stars of Ursa Major turn and have given its holiness to the number seven. The Atlas myths and those of the pillars of heaven often survive in obelisks, towers, and steeples, which still perpetuate primitive man's idea of the mainstay of the universe. Here, too, belong the universe tree and the bridges to another world, the dance of the stars, the wheel of the law, the prayer wheel, the fire wheel, the wheel of fortune, the one holy mountain as a cone piercing heaven — all these are traced from the original idea of a pole.
The swastika (The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilization, by Zelia Nuttall, Papers of Peabody Museum, vol. ii, 1901) was first used in the circumpolar regions, and was a record of the four positions of the nocturnal and annual circuits of the Bear and Dipper about the pole-star. It was first a year sign, then a symbol of the four quarters of the year and of the quadruplicate division, and of "a stable central power whose rule extended in four directions -and con- trolled the entire heavens." In India, Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria, cities and states were divided into four quarters with four tribes under a central chief, and thus society was harmonized under the ideal of a religious democracy. The pyramid, which originally had four stories and was cruciform, and many sacred structures, commemorate cosmical and territorial organization into four parts. The four quar- ters, the sacred middle, and above and below, represent a yet more extended con- ception of seven directions in space, as in Egypt there were seven classes. Start- ing from this common basis of fourfold division, a great variety of constitutions were independently invented by statesmen and philosophers who devised many cycles combined of numbers and signs to regulate time and communal life in imitation of the order and harmony of heavenly motion and under one supreme ruler, the earthly representative of Polaris. The origin of these schemes is generally ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 167 nebulae, through all stages of incandescence and cooling, to cinders; of vast bodies of equal size revolving about each other in immense periods; how of all this number scarcely eight hundred thousand are yet even catalogued; of the stratifications and general configurations of the stars in the Milky Way, in which our system is and from which we look out to it as from a center toward the edges of a lens-shaped group of stars com- prising all within the ken of astronomy.
Of all the sciences, astronomy is the oldest. Its theme is the largest. It deals with the greatest masses of matter and the longest stretches of time and space. As Emerson said, if the heavens were visible only one night in a thousand years the ascribed to a northern race who had discovered fire-making and evolved a cult and ritual suggested by it. They Vere persecuted for both their religious and demo- cratic views, and this would be an incentive to seek refuges and found colonies. This they did in the New World, transporting their ideas at widely separated criti- cal periods of their own history. Hence the close similarity between the art of the Andes and that of the Mediterranean, especially in plan and numerical schemes. Thus America became an isolated area of preservation for archaic forms of govern- ment, cultivated industry drawn at different epochs from various centers of Old World culture, and transmitted but with increasing native elements. The one basis that underlay all was the recognition of fixed laws governing the universe, and this was given by long observation of Polaris and northern stars. Thus we recog- nize anew how the entire intellectual, moral, and religious evolution of the race has resulted in fixed laws. From the time when our world began to rotate, the fact of one fixed point in space that never changed has had a mystic and irresistible influ- ence, raising the mind of man from darkness and confusion, and issuing in the idea of one central power, and from this the idea of an invisible and supreme Deity arose in the higher scale of spiritual development. Perhaps the Master Architect of the world designed this, still suggested by the sacred sign of the cross which is set for a sign in heaven; while the shaft, pole, or chark, which brought down fire, sug- gested a primitive mode of worship.
" The earliest year used by the first agricultural races was one of two seasons measured by Pleiades, beginning with the festival of the stars and the commemora- tion of dead ancestors celebrated in November " (The Ruling Races of Prehis- toric Times in India, Southwestern Asia, and Southern Europe; Westminster, 1894. See Essay IV). Then came the year of three seasons, the first official meas- ure of time by the barley-growing races who always began their year at the autumnal equinox. "These early astronomers substituted for the reckoning of time by the Pleiades one founded on the supposed friction of the pole, which they thought to be proven by the apparent motion of the stars around it." The heat thus gener- ated by the ever-turning fire drill was bounded by the four stars, which marked the four quarters of the heavens: viz., Sirius, which rose with the beginning rains of India at the summer solstice; the Great Bear; Argo in the south; and Corvus in the west. These latter constellations traced their birth to Sirius.
1 68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE sights of that night would be awaited with the greatest ex- pectation, and those of that generation alive to see it would count themselves happy. Its decline in both high schools and colleges is purely because it is no longer so taught as to meet youthful needs. Even when its first stages consisted largely in tracing constellations it used to be taught in a religious and almost devotional way. One of these old observatories bore, cut in stone over the entrance, the legend, " The heavens de- clare the glory of God," and over another stood "The undevout astronomer is mad." In looking over elementary text-books of our day, we find the greatest difference between those which treat the subject in a technical, mathematical way, and those which are more like popular reading books because they appeal to deep, primary sentiments of awe, wonder, reverence, and curiosity. The former method dwells chiefly upon celestial motions and makes more or less use of mathematics as its lan- guage. The revolution of the earth is often the starting-point, and I know of a high-school class who spent six precious weeks of individual competition in trying to determine the noon-mark most accurately. Prediction of eclipses, subtler motions and their determinations, explanations of equinox, aberration, and nutation, determinations of the eccentricity of orbits, the dif- ferent seasonal distances of the moon, etc., follow. Under this method carried to extreme, interest vanishes almost in direct proportion to difficulties and the end is disenchantment.
Under the other method, interest is first generated over a large field. The history of astronomy from astrology down is made interesting. Kepler, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and the heroology and biography in which this science so abounds and which gives it such high value as culture history, are given prominence. Telescopes with something of their history, and the casting and finishing of great lenses, are made as inter- esting as Schiller's Song of the Bell. Clocks and chronoscopes down to those that measure ten-thousandths of a second are described, along with gratings and other apparatus. Cos- mogony and the nebular theory, as a part of evolution, have a place, and something is told about ether and the development of the stellar world with the historical stages, now exemplified in different parts of space. Practical astronomy is given a* place and its effects traced in navigation, the discovery of ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 169 America, and the changes from the geocentric to the helio- centric view of things. Glimpses of the most recent discoveries and observations are included, such as the revolutions deter- mined in some of the fixed stars; photographs of the heavens; the process by which many thousands of the million stars now estimated to be visible through a forty-inch glass have been named or identified, comets, meteors — all with very copious pictures in text-books.
III. Not only is man a child of the sun, body and soul, but every dawning day rescues us from blindness in the great dark and recreates the mind as it wakes from the void of sleep. The soul is instinctively heliotropic and worships its Creator. The phenomenon of dawn to a soul refreshed by sleep kindles such a wealth of variegated imagery that it seems a calamity that modern childhood and youth are so withdrawn from its influ- ence. To bright young children, in our returns, the sun is often completely personified as getting out of bed, pulled or pushed upward by some alien power or person, rising like a balloon or on wings, shot up by a cannon, as being God's open- ing eye, God himself or his lamp, a hole in the sky, etc. Chil- dren a little older conceive the sun as making an effort to lift itself, to get free from the horizon, disentangle itself from the trees, break loose from the sea, as angry at the clouds and pushing them away or breaking through as a victor in a contest with them or with darkness. It seems most triumphant in the early hour when its movement is vertically upward against gravity. To children also, as to primitive man, the sun, like the moon, is a wanderer at its own free will. It floats or rolls along wherever it wishes; rises when it feels disposed to do so; and goes now fast, now slow. There is no idea of a fixed orbit, time, or rate. Some draw the breath with relief when the sun really gets clear of the horizon. If wakeful, they often fear morning will never come, or feel in bondage until light sets them free.
To the awakening imagination in adolescence it is but an easy and natural next step to Phaeton, with the rays as lines and the clouds as horses, the labors of Hercules, the birth of Aurora, A j ax's prayer for light, or a single touch of fancy gives the sun of Heraclitus daily secreted out of the body of the world, leaving its mass a little darker, colder, or more 50 17° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE corpse-like throughout. All the phototonic influences which pervade animate nature are here at their very best. It is no longer imposing, sensuous scenery only, but there is a feeling of victory, of triumph of the powers of good over those of evil, and so of worship, as in the famous antique statue of the Greek youth's prayer eastward to the dawn whence comes all our light and wisdom. It is all, too, a pregnant symbol of the age when the good, beautiful, and true really dawn in the soul.
So of solar rays our data show how they stimulate juve- nile fancies. They are described as " bars between me and an- other world "; " ladders for fairies to dance on and go to and from heaven on;" "a wreath of rays around the round happy face of the sun;" " the sun's long arms reaching out to embrace and warm us;" they " pierce all crevices and pry out darkness as you pry out a stone with a lever." Many make a dust to see the particles float in a ray, blow them, or try perhaps to follow one. The rays plunge into the sea to loosen or open a way from the sun, who sinks into it as they do; they spout out on all sides like jets of a fiery fountain; isolated rays are lone- some; are often feared if it is not known at once where they enter the trees or house, and with some this quest becomes a neurosis; clouds are very bold that do not fear them; the dark is many times as big but knows enough to fly at their approach. One thinks the floating motes separate particles of sunshine dancing; they and the rays die when the sun does; reflected rays are impertinent and rebellious; threads or ropes to hold the sun; tubes to suck up water; paths or ladders to the sky; strokes of an artist's brush; spears, daggers, with power to make us good or to punish us if we are bad; full of gold dust; the sun is unselfish to send them out so freely, vain to mirror himself in the water, or cruel to break the rays at its sur- face, etc.
All this shows that the soul of childhood and youth is a rank sprouting-bed for far more than poetry, mythology, or etymologies combined have yet exploited. In the past, if Max Muller and Cox are right, the darts of the far-shooting Apollo, the arrows of Philoctetes and Ulysses, and not only many magic shafts but perhaps the swords of Theseus, Perseus, and Siegfried, Arthur's Excalibur, Orlando's Durandal, the Volsung's good blade Gram, etc., are only anthropomorphized ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 171 rays of the sun. But these are all tropes of an age of war. There are also triumphs of love, pity, and science yet to be wrought out in new artistic and humanistic forms if we are to unfold all the best latent possibilities of the young, and fully accept, feel, and yield to the inspiration of their needs as our muse.