Some blinded animals sleep for lack of stimulus to keep awake, and as blind children are indisposed to action in part for the same reason, bright lights quicken the mentation of idiots. For small children, a succession of dark days tends to sloth, somnolence, irritability, or dyspepsia. Some are un- toned in dark corners, and groups of children are often so sensitive that a cloud passing over the sun causes a notice- able depression of spirits, activity, or both. They falter in their play, are less merry, hesitate, pause, and neurotic children often shiver and catch their breath. As the degree of its illumination diminishes, they speak more softly, whisper, or are silent, grow less energetic in their movements, their spirits sink, the quality and quantity of work in school declines, their standards and ideals droop, they are slow and inattentive, all tasks seem harder, the appetite is enfeebled and freaky, pugnac- ity increases, they are very easily discouraged, huddle, clasp hands, cling about each other or adults, suffer from ennui, are prone to collapse attitudes, are lonesome, homesick, etc., but when the sun breaks out, especially on new snow, their ex- hilaration, noise, activity, and joy are boundless.
Here, too, adolescence brings a marked change to children. Early nightfall is the withdrawal of stimulus, physical inac- tivity, and rest. They enjoy the panorama of a fine sunset or are subdued and sad that the day is done. But to youth twilight means far more. As sense is dulled and the body less active, reflection awakes and declares its independence of sur- roundings. Of all the day it is the calm, pensive hour for retrospection and protension. Friends and kinsmen gather and social instincts unfold. The hour of closing day, if the adoles- cent soul is directly exposed to its influences, opens up a new life of sentiment and mysticism. As sense is dimmed, soul comes forth. There is a deeper, sacred, symbolic meaning to it all. Conscience awakes, if not in the form of reproach, in aspirations for a new and better life. The peace and purity of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the evening sky is reflected in the moral nature. The isolation of gathering twilight brings solitude; the soul is alone with itself, face to face with duty and ideals. There are new long- ings for a larger, higher life, a desire for more self-knowledge and self-expression. A sunset is a sermon, and " betwixt the gloaming and the mirk " is the time for music, favorite hymns, because heaven and God seem near, as well as for philosophic thought and reflection. It is the hour, too, for reviewing the day, for moralizing, dreamily though it be, and for resolutions for the future, for ambitious plans for adulthood, castle build- ing, and reverie, often the best expression in the young of spontaneous psychic growth. In the great hush and peace the imagination is kindled. Much is thought and talked of that would be impossible by garish day. That is for plain, lucid prose, but now is the time for reading or even writing poetry, the time when so many, in our returns, invoke their Muse. Some would compose new music; sing something wildly weird and sad; tell sweet thoughts, if only to themselves or an imagi- nary companion; let the mind wander away and away, shunning every noise and intrusion in an abandon of delicious depression, some of which is perhaps an after-effect of the crude childish fears which now in large measure and rather suddenly fade. Pedagogy, especially that of religion and art, has here a great opportunity and perhaps will one day rise to its duty and con- struct a vesper service that, while not without shelter and com- fort exposing the soul to all the sensuous phenomena of slowly gathering night, will devise adequate expression for the in- stincts that now turn the soul inward; make it feel the need of protection and trust; preform it to walk by faith and not by sight; strengthen the feeling of dependence; anticipate the evening of life and the great sleep that wakes not. This is the way the soul should descend into the dark valley, " like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams." This is the hour of sentiment and should be sacred to its culture.
The solar heroes exposed in their infancy on eastern hills, golden-haired, strongest at noon with strange fits of gloom, subject for a time to alien and baser powers, have now sunk to their death in a triumphant transformation scene implying a resurrection. Night " drinks the blood of the sun as he ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 173 slaughtered sank "; " the pale wandering ghosts that beat the gates of heaven all night " are creeping forth. Darkness " draweth night's thin net," " blackens bush and tree/' falls " fold on fold dulling the western gold." The west breaks into bars of color, or perhaps there remains " a lifeless cloud like a dead angel lying in a shroud with lilies on her breast." The trees " turn old and gray " as the shadows drape them. Hesper " rises over the orbs of the sun," which has fallen de- feated into " ominous dim space," leaving only " the stern blue crypt of night." Thus poets try to conserve somewhat of what youth feels in metaphoric phrases not stereotyped to myth. Twilight has created moods and sentiments all its own, and has done much to shape the soul and inspired much poetry. This sweet disphoria is the normal counterpart of the euphoria of dawn.
When darkness becomes complete the waking child be- comes helpless. It can neither resist nor fly. Perhaps old night fears of animals or ghosts tense the nerves, and in those who are nervous phobias develop, for the old night of ignorance, mother of fears, still rules infant neurones. But now the fires and lamps are suddenly lit, and the eye and brain snatched back from these tensions or from somnolence, the most exact bio- logic expression of darkness, and we have the interesting phenomenon of " candle-light fever." Children wake up as to a new morn in petto, are wild, noisy, frolicsome, and abandoned. This, I suggest, may be the reverberation in modern souls of the joy that in some prehistoric times hailed the Prometheus art of controlling fire and defying night. This developed even- ing and made man's habits seminocturnal, but the gift has cost us the boon of sunrise, has brought the sadness of study and wisdom, and has robbed us of the optimistic upward striving hours of dawn. With the adolescent it is no longer a matter of retinal excitement, but at first comes a stormy period of defying night, a passion for seeing its side of life and na- ture. This perhaps is helpful as establishing a diathesis of intense activity which more and more tends to be psychic rather than somatic. Culture and mind drill owe very much to the development of evening. Many first learn to think when the distractions of the day are gone, and many can do this best at no other time.
174 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Finally, if Cleanthes's hymn to the sun as the source of all life could make Goethe a sun worshiper for life, how great must have been its impression when paganism was in its zenith! To Aristotle the sun was divine also because it had the power of self-motion. From the same psychic soil and from the same seed of wondrous awe has since come the zest that animates the work of the solar observatories of Potsdam and Meudon, and the sun is no less supreme to modern science than to Plato and Socrates. The processional from the infant concept of a fire ball to that of solar physics and chemistry is as continuous and natural as it is majestic. This measure of paganism in youth makes the better astronomer later. The younger Herschel thought the willow-leaf maculations seen through his telescope to be living organisms, hundreds of miles in length though they must be, and defying intense heat. Like bold hypotheses for the adult, so myth and poetry for the young supplement and feed the roots of science and are not opposed save in narrow souls. Perhaps crass weeds of ignorance must flourish in their season to make a rich mold for better growth later; or, to change the figure, as the rough glacial age smoothed and trit- urated the earth's surface and is perhaps still doing a being's work though it has retreated to a polar ice cap, so the best thoughts of the best men of old are often relegated to ever earlier childhood.
The practical and the scientific outcome here again is that, if it is well that the child should reproduce ancient industries, by the same token he should, if his development is to be com- plete, here also revive the ancient sentiments and view-points of the race, more or less as the tadpole must develop a tail only to be absorbed by the growing legs, the development of which it was necessary both to stimulate and to feed. If youth ever really reads at all the literature that the sun, dawn, twi- light, and night have inspired, he must find the object-lesson in his own experience by frequent and perhaps systematic ex- posure to these influences, or else he is learning words with no meaning, masterpieces which are senseless conventionalities, for his heart rings hollow while his memory only is stuffed.1 1 See on all this section my study with Dr. T. L. Smith: Reactions to Light and Darkness; Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1903, pp. 21-83. Also I. Gaule, Einfluss des Nacht, Centralbl. f. Psychol., April 28, 1900.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 1 75 IV. The moon is our nearest celestial neighbor, only some ten earth's circumferences away, and here astronomy began. It perhaps first and chiefly lifted men's thoughts to the sky, releasing them from mundane affairs, and is their first halting-place in the quest of the infinite. No celestial object excites such interest in youth as the moon. The ideas of young children have been collated as to its size, distance, the material out of which it is made, how it got up into the sky, why it does not fall, how the form of its different quarters is explained, where it stays when it is absent, what is seen or imagined in it — the nursery folklore which pervades all juve- nile ideas and conceptions about it.1 They often talk to the moon, say " Shine on, I want you," " Blessed moon," sing to it, offer it toys. If they are bad, they tell it to go away; ask ifr for a kiss, to be their playmate; think of its celestial companionship with clouds, stars, sun, who are perhaps its relatives; think it the face of Jesus looking out of heaven; imagine it to be Moses, Santa Claus; courtesy to it for luck; imagine people in the moon and fairies, those without head or all head, angels, musicians, lighthouse-keepers, souls of the dead, babies, crooked people, penal colonies of Sabbath- breakers. They often detect faces of God, a veiled lady, a man, perhaps her husband, perhaps of just dead parents or play- mates, and trace out eyes, beard, etc.; see fire, smoke, the cow and dog of nursery rhyme, and are often abandoned and mildly intoxicated in its light. They speculate how it moves, whether by rolling or sliding steadily or by jerks; whether it rises from behind the woods, or the sea, etc. They often think it an ex- ternal conscience which either smiles, grows bright, or comes to them and increases in size when they are good, and is dim, hidden, small, far away, if they are bad. It sees them, and in 1 Five hundred and fifty-five children, well distributed as to age, answered the question how the man got in the moon (How the Man Got in the Moon, by Miriam B. Levy; Fed. Sem., October, 1895, vol. iii, pp. 317-318), in nineteen different ways. From seven to ten, and especially from eight to nine, the question was taken in all seriousness, and he was said to have flown in, jumped in, gone in a balloon, by tower, went there when he died, got there by electricity, to be God, angel, etc. But from twelve to fourteen, when the census ends, there is either a marked blank- ness of mind on the whole subject or else disbelief that there is a man there, or, in a less number of cases, an attempt to give a scientific explanation.
I76 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE its presence they shrink from naughty acts. It can see and tell us what our friends are doing at a distance.1 In early adolescence, however, the moon rises to great prominence in its influence upon sentiment. Infantile con- ceptions fade, and it becomes an object of a new interest and comes into the most sympathetic rapport with the religious and sentimental life of the soul, where it has a role hitherto, as I think, entirely unsuspected. From 443 returns it is plain that it is now profoundly associated with the moral, poetic, and re- ligious life. Even before this stage of development it is often pitied when it is thought to be pale, or wearied from long shin- ing, or wandering, or sick, because the sun refuses the light it craves. Pubescents gaze, languish, and become sentimental. Girls in the teens, whose windows open to the sky, often draw their blinds that the moon may not see them undress, although a few love exposure to it. The sight of it thrills many a maiden with pleasure or occasionally with sadness. Some involunta- rily clench the hands and grow tense; others feel unworthy and are humiliated. Many a maiden sits, watches the moon, and spins fancies, how it is the oldest and largest star; that perhaps her dead mother is there; longs to visit it till a lump rises in the throat; it is so soothing, sympathetic, tender; its light is mild and soft, and it must love everybody and everything. It rests them, makes them good, and perhaps homesick for it. Others feel only awe, and want to be still and alone with every moon, or stretch out their arms to it. Many a phrase, quotation, and often prayer is spontaneously repeated.
It now chiefly suggests love. Some maidens literally tell the moon their troubles and ask many things, and often find encouragement. Many young women can never endure to look at or think of the moon if away from home. They are made homesick and intolerably sad because it seems cold and friendless, or perhaps they wish to go off by themselves and cry. They sit and watch it and think, feel a strange fascina- tion, and can not take their eyes off from it. Others are in- spired to walk, to ride, see some one, be out with their girl or 1 The Moon in Childhood and Folklore, by J. W. Slaughter; Amer. Jour, of Psychology, xiii, pp. 294-318. Also, Note on Moon Fancies, by G. S. H.; Amer, Jour, of Psychology, January, 1903, p. 88.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 177 beau; to go to bed when the moon is at its best seems like wast- ing opportunity to do something. Some are ashamed or afraid to have the moon see them misbehave, or perhaps study its face to see if they can detect a smile or a frown. Thus in many ways the soul at this age reverberates with the echo of the many-sounding sea and the shore where terrestrial life first arose from it. The tides still rule us with a monthly as well as a daily rhythm, and lunacy or moon-madness is both more and more aggravated during its periods, which affect nutrition, growth, sleep, health, disease, suicide, etc. The young often develop toward it some of the same sentiments of love, de- pendence, and reverence, which in infancy were directed toward the mother's face, and which in normal mature life may be all the more effectively turned toward God or less concrete forms of goo'dness, truth, and beauty, because they have been developed by the moon, which is one of the important generators of religious feeling, and which has been the object of supreme worship to so many races, both savage and civilized, for even the Greeks thought the moon a proper object of divine worship.1 When we turn from the moon of the heart to the moon of science, the contrast seems at first painful. We learn that it is a burnt-out cinder with no water, although Schmidt's map, seven feet in diameter, and even Webb's, show among the four hundred named objects on the lunar surface many regions still called by the old names — seas, lakes, bays, marshes, 1 This direction of man's animistic propensity has not only nourished religion but science, and has been strangely persistent among wise men. Pythagoras thought the moon peopled with larger animals and trees than the earth. Many have since thought it a mirror in which they could read what was taking place on earth. Flammarion found over a hundred imaginary voyages to the moon. Louis XIV proposed a 10,000 foot telescope to show the animals in the moon. Al- though its air can not exceed one-one-hundred-and-fiftieth of ours in barometric pressure, it has lately been seriously urged that moon men might be habituated to extreme rarefaction, that our air would drown them, and to argue that it has no inhabitants would be the reasoning of a fish. A lady who asked Arago what was on the side of the moon we never see, what about its inhabitants, its effects on the weather and on love, on being answered that he did not know, turned away exclaiming, " What then is the use of being so learned? " The Berlin Academy, knowing that careful records show that the moon had no effect on the weather, sup- pressed the predictions in its official almanac, but its sale, on which so much of the society's income depended, was so reduced that they were restored.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE etc. There are, therefore, no clouds, no plant or animal life, and during the long lunar day, equal to fourteen of ours, its temperature passes from at. least 200 degrees below zero up to that of boiling water and even far above. Although the best telescopes bring it within less than a hundred miles, and few terrestrial countries are mapped so fully and truly as the surface always turned toward us, and on which the earth- shine is from thirteen times as large a surface, it is nothing after all but a traveling corpse of a world which no doubt once had life on it but is now a silent prophecy of what our planet will sometime come to. G. H. Darwin tells us the earth-moon system began at least fifty-four million years ago, when the earth was revolving so fast that a day was from only two to four hours long, that tidal friction is still separating the moon and earth, and that in a calculable time, some millions of years hence, the rotation of the latter will be so retarded that we shall have a day of nine hundred and sixty hours. The great selenographers, like Beer, Maedler, Neison, began when young with profound sentimental interest in the moon. Has their love kept pace with their growing knowledge of it, or is the intellectual zest of their maturity only its transformation? Do we prefer such modern knowledge as is above sampled to the old romantic zest, and what is their relation to each other? If we wish to make selenic experts, should we first expose them to the maximum of poetic inebriation before extermina- ting it by knowledge? In these profound questions we face again the vast problem of myth and science. To tell the moon- struck maiden that she is gazing at a globe of cold lava is a shock akin to that which the Greeks felt when told by Anytus that Socrates held the moon to be a stone. Although the great hebamist denied this heresy and declared that all men knew the moon was a god, this was no doubt one motive to his con- demnation.
Interest in things celestial is perhaps as good a mark as any for distinguishing between the highest brute and the lowest human mind. Our race became men when they looked up, and perhaps reason and scientific thought began in musing on the causes of day, night, seasons, storms, etc., in the heavens. Moon-zest seems earliest. Day and sun were matters of course, while the moon came and went, changed form, and was visi- ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 179 ble in the quiet, reverie part of the day. Schultze * thinks moon, sun, moving planets, the fixed stars studding the vault of night, and all rotating on the pole as an axis about our cen- tral earth, and last the blue sky itself, is the order in which these five passed one after another as culture developed through the four stages of manism, when each was regarded as only the sensuous object it seemed; animism, when a soul was given it; polytheism, when each was divine; and finally each in the above order came to be thought only an instrument or symbol of one power back of and including them, and only at this last stage did monotheism and the adoration of the All-Father arise. Each successive stage emancipated from a lower idolatry. As each successively emerged from the neuter, thing, or it stage and became masculine, the lower and sup- planted object lapsed, as primitive languages show, to the feminine gender. However this be, the spectacle of the heavens must have had much to do in evoking mind, wherever mind exists in the universe, by its endless fascinations.
V. It is hardly too strong a statement to say that there is nothing whatever that the plastic, polymorphic fancy of chil- dren does not see in the clouds. Not only is everything on earth mirrored and transfigured there and everything read, re- flected and pictured, but the factual and literary world is far transcended, and many things with no earthly counterpart are revealed to the imagination of which they are perhaps the chief school, inspirer, and in no small degree the creator. If instead of living at the bottom of a deep sea of air with such changing phenomena taking place above us, so in contrast with the fixity of earth, we can conceive human life possible on, e. g., the cloudless moon, the soul would have been a very different and far more prosaic thing. Not only is everything seen in cloud- land, but every known emotion and every sentiment is strongly played on by its scenery. Its vast repertory of effects has done much to make the life of feeling deep, rich, and variegated. The " moods of heaven's deep heart " are reflected in our own. They have inspired so much in myth and poetry that without cloud-psychoses both would suffer great loss. We should have had no vision of Ezekiel or John, should have lost most of the 1 Psychologic der Naturvolker, Leipzig, 1900, p. 318 e( seq.
i8o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE best of the old Aryan myths, and the Vedas and Bible prophe- cies would be impoverished; we would have had no Niobe, Nephele, swan maidens, golden fleece, Valkyries, harpies, no, or a very different Odin, Walhalla, Jove, Hermes, Polyphe- mus, Phryxos, Helle, Phaiakian ships, great roc, houris, no Greek or old Hindu heaven, no sphinx, Apollo, etc. The child's imagery about clouds is not only rankly profuse, but sometimes of uncontrolled or almost delusional intensity. Many think they see real angels, saints, faces of God, friends, landscapes, seascapes, shipwrecks, fairy islands, castles, Queen Mab's shin- ing tent, volcanoes, chariots and horses, monsters, battles, car- avans, swords, banners, patterns and tapestry of supreme tint and texture, hands, fish, Santa Claus, Indians, dead people lying in state, Dido, Judgment-day scenes, cities, Christ on his sparkling throne, geographical scenes, conflagrations, views in heaven, animals, which are often as numerous as Bible scenes, flowers and trees, and things too grand, beautiful, and fearful for earth. Distances are greatly underestimated, so that every- thing is near and the effects are immediate and almost reflex. They often want to go to, touch, roll, plunge into their downy substance, lie in, sail off with them, follow the persons, or take part in the scenes they see in them.1 Some find themselves un- consciously so absorbed in watching the transformations that they involuntarily sigh or cry out with pain when the pictures change or fade. Some form settled habits of watching them, not for fancy, but merely for the joy of color and form.
With adolescence all this undergoes a characteristic change for those sensitized to clouds. Instead of wanting to soar away to, float with, embrace or be embraced by them, their lovely shapes inspire youth with a vague longing for greater beauty than earth affords. Transient as they are, they stir suggestion in his soul of something nobler and purer than has been, and arouse moral and esthetic aspiration. Not physical contact or levitation, but inner exaltation, a hunger of soul for a larger and more glorious life, is now the normal reaction. Ideal con- structions are suggested beyond the immediate presentation of sense. The thrills are of ethical expansion. The mind is led 1 See my paper with J. E. W. Wallin: How Children and Youth Think and Feel about Clouds; Fed. Sem., vol. ix, pp. 450-506.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 181 to regions of ineffable tranquillity and of light unsullied till earth seems dull, gloomy, solitary. There is no real illusion, less fear, but far more often lingering, but perhaps sweet, de- pression. Youth does not picture weather people or perhaps not even angels or God just behind the clouds, veiled by them from the sight of men as they do their work, and the heaven they suggest is no longer literal or just beyond or in the clouds, for all the space ideas are vastated. Behindness is metamor- phosed into symbolism. Even the colors that inundate and intoxicate the brain in such vast variety typify life. The color sense, nowhere so satisfied as in some cloudscapes, besides its sensuous beauty, has some mystic meaning, or at least suggests some problem though it can not be solved or even formulated. The illusion is gone, but the fancy persists, and the feeling far more. The celestial picture gallery speaks to the heart more than to sense. Through the teens and early twenties the fantasies will fade and perhaps almost vanish, so that the effect is immediately upon the mood with diminishing constructive imagery. The transiency of these ghostly silhouettes suggests that man and all things, even the earth itself, will melt away and vanish. Words themselves can not so mirror every emo-