tion or mood from joy or brightness to depression and melan- choly. They symbolize everything in life, and perhaps nothing can so elevate and expand the feelings. If the natural cloud tropism of this age is indulged, Ruskin, who more forcibly than any one else has insisted that otherwise the imagination is dwarfed and sentiments crippled by disuse, thinks that genius often finds here the inspiration for its masterpieces. Thus in an added sense, " to the solid ground of Nature trusts the mind that builds for aye."
Nephelopsychoses, if such a word may be coined, are dis- tinctly more prominent and numerous among girls than boys, and as the female organism is more conservative this of itself suggests rapport with phylogeny. They take a deeper hold on the soul at adolescence, and the feelings, which are so pro- foundly stirred by them, are older than the intellect and are the form in which new momenta of heredity are expressed, and this again suggests race experience. Perhaps we can now, in view of new data from child study, compare, although with much vagueness and uncertainty, the two. In the early history of the 182 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE race clouds were observed more intensively and protensively because they were thought to reveal the feelings of the divine powers toward men and to forecast future events. Cloud-gaz- ing was very likely a very serious and anxious business. Abo- riginal people lived in the country, and its monotony and the absence of social excitement inclined to attentive scrutiny of the ever metamorphosing landscape above, while pastoral and agricultural life, because more dependent on the weather, in- creased interest in them as weather-bearers. With the modern child they form a far smaller part of the environment; he is so well sheltered that weather is less important; because younger at the same stage his constructive faculties are less developed, and so his concepts are less elaborated and the faculties in- volved are slowly lapsing to vestigial rudiments. Because liv- ing in an age when traditions on the subject are less evolved and dominant, his mind is freer, its creations more varied and fleeting, life about him is more interesting and distracting from the heavens, and he sometimes actually grows myopic in mind because he renounces looking upward, which is etymologically the most characteristic act of man, anthropos. Powers that once entified and personated objects are atrophied, or if youth becomes a cloud-gazer it is for past1'me and not seriously or for business. Youth now knows and feels that clouds are always mere phenomena and appearance with nothing noumenal, and however ignorant he may be, all his nephelopsychoses are under the dominance of knowledge enough of condensation and vaporization to kill this factor of mystery forever and his reaction is purely emotional.
Children wonder, fear, and admire impressive cloud-scenes. But youth feels nameless longings, awe, reverence, or is home- sick for a great love and melted to tenderness, and rises from the thought of something behind the clouds to that of a power behind nature. The pleasure and pain and all the other senti- ments suggested are often disproportionately great compared with the strength of the stimulus, and that suggests inherited psychic vestiges from a far past. The child's images are the foreground of the soul and are of some hundred different spe- cies and varities in our less than four hundred persons, with but few stable and uniform reactions. With youth the cloud language is addressed to the heart and its responses are no less ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 183 varied and voluminous. The child observes in its hasty and cursory way and reacts by pictures that a painter might attempt to portray. Youth, too, observes but more absent-mindedly and in reverie, and its reactions only the poet's pen, not the painter's brush, could seek to represent. One would conserve the visual glory by depicting it; the other would perpetuate the sentiment inspired by inditing. In the child the intensity of the emo- tions of fear and painful reaction are most disproportionate to the cause, and in youth suggest inherited vestiges from an age when man was at the mercy of uncontrolled forces in nature. In the youth, joy, with perhaps often the rapture of woe, is incited by effects more felt than seen, suggesting a pre- potency of the subjective over the objective that dates to a later age when love was well on with its great work of casting out fear and was beginning to give nature a new language but had not yet found its own by focusing its wide-ranging sec- ondary psychic qualities on a chosen mate. The religious reactions are so prominent that religion itself and the senti- ments on which it rests would be very different without them. They lift thoughts and perhaps prayers upward, and give a sense of reality to tenuous and heavenly things. At no moment does the world above seem so overwhelmingly and intensely real as when thunder rolls overhead. Very often special cloud experiences are indelible, and religious imagery and faith are sometimes given a great reality and material support.1 We also here find the old contrast between sentiment and science. The feelings are not edified by learning that clouds are 1 A girl of seventeen one evening at the seashore saw a cloud as if all the rivers in the world were hung up to dry like ribbons; could not bear to have it fade, and wanted to paint it. Another, when thirteen, saw a cloud at sunset beautifully tinted and the shape of an angel's wing, which brought to mind a young friend who had just died, and she had to weep. A girl of nineteen, waiting for a train, saw a cloud like a lava river with a distant volcano, which changed to a sea of ice and then became a silver path leading from earth to heaven, which seemed like the strait and narrow way which led to life eternal, and it was felt might be a special warning to her. A girl of nineteen saw Jesus slowly ascending, glad but glorious, and wished to rise with him. One saw the resurrection enacted and watched with awe to see it again. Another came to believe in heaven from seeing Christ with saints in white. Communion with clouds sometimes consoles in affliction; encour- ages high purpose and resolve; threatens or intimidates wrong; answers questions; reveals secrets; tells fortunes; teaches aspiration and idealism, and even belief in the reality of souls and immortality.
184 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE aqueous vapor or by memorizing their names or studying their laws in meteorology. Here, too, there is a light that goes out in the heart when the light of science is kindled in the mind, and we have many records of children who resist the first new adult knowledge with a vehemence that suggests the long war- fare between science and religion, as rain comes to be under- stood as precipitation and not leakage from a sea above the firmament, or the opening of heavenly windows. But here, too, imagination is the propaideutic, and myth and poetry the Vorfrucht of science, making the mental soil friable and fertile.
VI. Young children invent many mental images concern- ing the wind. It sleeps and wakes, whistles, whispers, pipes, roars, frets, sings, howls, sobs, gasps, sighs, screams. It is very often personified and talked to. It sometimes seems to make exclamations like ah! whew! so! look out! hark! go away! and is often talked back to, etc.; is a giant; lives in the mountains of clouds; frolics, scolds, caresses, strews light about, etc. In its roar they hear music, battles, laugh- ter, anguish, as did primitive man, and as metaphor and poetry still describe. It is a friend of trees, which perhaps start it, or quarrels with clouds, or it may be a waving figure. In the teens most of these images fall off, but the wind often has the most intimate rapport with moods. Its whistling and piping may bring intolerable ennui and unrest, or, again, it lulls to sleep, and murmurs interjections if not even words. Strong wind suggests what God can do and often seems to indicate and measure the degree of his anger. The powers of the air, which the ancient Hebrews and so many other races have invested with mystery and awe, suggest gentle spiritual presences. Zephyr and Boreas are perhaps faintly personified; they bring and take messages of love, come from heaven or are God's breath. It perhaps first of all taught men the tremendous lesson of the reality and causal efficiency of something unseen, so that not only in our own but in many languages, etymologies of words suggesting soul and spirit mean simply wind. Psycho-physical researches have shown the strong effect of humidity, altitude, and barometric pressure unaided by noise, and sudden change in affecting moods, and our returns give abundant evidence that there are ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE i«5 at least many anemic souls over which most of all in adolescent years vEolus makes his dominion felt.
The wind now often seems to express sentiments about our acts and thoughts. It is friendly or at enmity, perhaps there are ghosts or witches in it. Instead of cuddling away or fidget- ing like the child, many youths are made mentally restless, and the suggestive power of a high wind seems vastly increased. Some fancy themselves at sea with all the symptoms of sea- sickness; others imagine possible and impossible disasters, many kinds of animals, battles, machinery, cars, thunder, every mood of the ocean, pathetic scenes. Sometimes these are in vivid imagery. The ^Eolian Pan pipe has wondrous power over the soul and comes so close that its every change of pitch or loudness is followed by psychic changes of stress or tension. This wind-song needed only to be fretted with tonality and har- nessed with scales to create music, the power both to compose and feel which it has helped so much. Interesting, too, is the fact of anemophobia. From feeling the incessant changes in intensity and direction which are as close as our pulses, but which follow no known law and awaiting with nervous or bated breath its " what-next," this bandmaster of the many- membered orchestra of nature-music plays on the whole gamut of our emotional life, and overwrought souls are still JEolus caves from which may yet be loosed imaginary winds that threaten to sweep away earth, sea, and heavens.1 Thus, what in children is nerve-stress from high barometric pressure, tends in youth to anxieties.
Like the race, the child knows wind long before it sus- pects the existence of the atmosphere as an all-encompassing, shoreless, island-less sea on the very bottom of which we have to crawl out our lives. In regard to this mechanical mixture of gases, full of odors, motes, smokes, a heat-trap for the solar rays, and so a blanket to give the earth a warm and more equable temperature, abounding in germs even almost to the pole, so that it has its own biology, exerting vast pressure with- out and within the body, so that we live by and on it, creating in neurotic temperaments claustrophobic and globus symptoms2 1 My "Fears"; Am. Jour, of Psy., vol. viii, p. 171. 51 1 86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the element by which all life is sustained, the form in which all things have existed, to which they are re-resolvable, its skyey color being cosmic dust, the rich body of facts and of still richer symbols is now in order. The simple laws of dew point, pre- cipitation, boiling points, other nodes in the thermic scale, and other rudiments of meteorology should be taught by those broad enough, while drilling in isotherms and isobars, currents, apparatus, weather forecasts, etc., not to ignore the state of mind that needs also to muse on the ether of the empyrean of Hippocrates or Dante to be breathed only in mountain life, where it gave inspiration because it was the medium in which the gods lived. Teachers who can draw at need upon the his- toric stages of development here, not omitting poetry or the modern theories of ether while the mind of the boy in his teens can be so easily taught the stimulating and expanding little which only the wisest know, and perhaps get his first ravishing glimpse of the frontier of human knowledge, lead his mind captive at will!
VII. The thermal scale as now explored by science ranges from near the absolute zero of 460 below, where energy seems to die and chemical action ceases, up to circa 15,000 above, where most solid substances volatilize. In his own body, man can vary but some ten degrees and live and his environment and that of all animal existence has for the most part a range of hardly more than 100° F. Although placed far nearer the lower than the upper limit of controllable heat, he is nearly four times nearer the pain limit of heat than of cold. These sensations early orient the child, which like all beings, whether by tropism or sense tends to the thermal optimum most favor- able for the most intense vitality. One of the most fascinating activities of the child's mind is found in the instructive curios- ity and the creative reactions up and down the thermometric scale.1 Jack Frost seems to be the child's thermal correlate of Loki, the heat sprite of Teutonic mythology. He appears to fill a real need of the childish soul and is vastly more plastic and less conventionalized than Santa Claus. He lives in snow- 1 See my study with C. E. Browne: Children's Ideas of Fire, Heat, Frost and Cold; Fed. Sem., March, 1903, vol. x, pp. 27-85.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 187 banks, icebergs, caves, with God, in the earth, sky, air, in the sun; is an icicle, a snow-man, a snowflake; is invisible because he is so small, of mountainous bulk, six inches high, like an elf, Puck, a fairy, a brownie, a dwarf, an owl, a bug, a pigeon, a painter of the windows with pictures of trees, fields, animals, flowers, ferns and leaves, woods, caves, seas, and many of the forms such as fancy sees in the fire, clouds, or moon; makes them bad or good according to the children's conduct; etches them in or " breathes on things to make them white and stiff;" nips grass and flowers; pinches noses, fingers, toes, cheeks; carries a bag of complexion powder; howls in the wind, on which he rides drawn by rabbits, or flies on the backs of birds; can go through closed doors and windows; is a " cold devil;" is old, young; icicles are his whiskers; his hair and beard are white or powdered with snow; he opens nuts with an ice sword; wanders by night like a lost soul; sleeps by day; all he touches cracks; he controls the weather; is spiteful or roguish, wicked or kind; and is far more prominent in the life of girls than in that of boys.
Much of this is, of course, due to suggestion, but it is al- most impossible not to believe that much is spontaneous and original in the fecund fancy of children. Why he is more com- monly conceived than a heat sprite is probably not because there is no " cold sun " or central source of cold and the soul needs something concrete and so makes it, for the child mind does not conceive the sun as the one source and center of heat. Is it because there is no " cold fire " or chemical phenomena from which cold radiates like heat from the hearth, and that the mind therefore tends to create a nidus for the polar opposite of heat by some kind of unconscious process like that invoked by philologists to explain so much, e. g., their principle of anal- ogy? Perhaps the view most immediately suggested by our returns is that Jack Frost comes as near or nearer than any- thing else to be an independent modern creation of the child mind. Like every mythological personation, it was helped on by many facts and suggestions from many sources and is not a creation ex nihilo any more than were those of antiquity or savagery. Yet here perhaps we have the best key within our very doors for unlocking the mysteries of racial myth-making.
True, its products here are very crude, rank, extremely diverse, 1 88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and undomesticated by literature or art. Here, for once, chil- dren in our over-illuminated age and land escaped the peda- gogic grafters and put forth a fresh, vigorous, wild shoot that is indigenous and expresses their own soul and does not merely reflect what adults have put into it. Better yet, each makes his own Jack Frost, and he is still plastic, unconvention- alized, ununiformitized, and unstandardized.
The charm of fire-gazing is a great school of the plastic imagination. The excitant is far more mobile than clouds, and still more so than frost forms on the window pane. If the very Eigenlicht of the retina starts the photistic forms that Galton and many others have described, how much more than anything else in the physical world the incessant changes of fire are cal- culated to arouse suggestion, and the series of vivid pictures it presents to set up manifold trains of spontaneous reverie that hold the soul under a spell that is rudely broken, like sudden awakening, if the embers fall or some outer interruption brings us back to ourselves and to the present. Here children see animals' faces, sky and sea scenes, clouds and ships, flowers, pixies, brownies, fairies, dwarfs, monsters, soldiers and battles, demons and angels, eyes, blood, landscapes, illustrations of stories, gods and devils, hell and heaven, dances, church service, chimeras, a hut becomes a palace, air castles, caves and mines of precious metals and diamonds, volcanoes, everything in action and rapidly changing and flitting fears that crea- tures may break out or beauties vanish. The child hears the noises of every animal and insect; the fire creatures laugh, cry, sing, roar, moan, are angry, unhappy; leaves rustle and waves beat audibly; they or the very wood or coal scream in agony till we pity them, or are talkative to each other; the whips crack; the guns go off in volleys; the hyenas and wolves growl; and children are rapt and absorbed almost to the point of hyp- nosis, while many of these experiences are so vivid that they are recalled long after. Smoke, too, is dirty steam, baby clouds, fairy robes, soap-suds, the breath of the fire or of the animals in it, scorched or roasted air, live ghosts or birds. Ashes are death, cold and corpse-like, no longer light and alive, but dead and dark, wood or coal with the light and heat taken out of them; the clothes the baby brands are put to bed in when the fire is raked, cold fire, softened wood, the stuff we are all made ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 189 of and what we shall all return to at last, and hence shivery and dreary. So with flushed face and spellbound mind, the world and life are all reflected in the soul, its moral lessons taught in this primal philosophy of the chimney corner, and the soul oriented to the beginning and end of all things. Happy the family and even the schoolroom that can still thus expose the youthful soul to these lessons, and without the open, blaz- ing fireplace, which needs the story hour, no story can be quite complete.
Disequilibrated children go further and develop phobias in both and a mania in one direction. Among the fears often flitting, and sometimes morbid, are that it will get hotter or colder till everything will burn or freeze, while the passion for burning things, universal in infants, if not repressed by reason may later issue in pyrorhania with its complicated motivations.
In the souls of early races, which are only those of children magnified, the culture period begins with the domestication of fire, or subjecting Agni, or the yet wilder Loki, to the rule of Hestia. It made the hearth the center of domestic life, and in temples was kept by perpetual ministrations as a sign of immortality. The Parsees punished its defilement by death. When rekindled every fifty-two years in the Aztec mountains, it meant a renewed covenant with the gods that their devas- tating anger should not flame forth to man's destruction, shear- ing the forest hair of the earth and making havoc. Many a myth of its origin, many a form of fire burial, and many a type of baptism by fire show that this brother of the wind and sea has been both more friendly and more cruel to man than any of the elements. It is no wonder he is more profoundly pyrotactic than he knows, dominated unconsciously even in his migrations by it. Through it man communicates with the gods in sacrifice. It is a symbol of purification and even spirit- ualization and etherization. The smoke of altars is incense inhaled by divine nostrils. Its tongue of flame lapped the burnt- offering and was the emblem of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Without thermal experience life would be robbed of much thought, and metaphor, and science, and morals would lack many reenforcements; there would be no hells of heat or cold, and life would be monotonous, if not indeed as impossible as are two dimensional beings. Even sympathy, from which 19° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE morals arose, almost began with warm-blooded animals which brooded eggs and incubated their young, which thus passed more rapidly through the dangerous period of immaturity, and which, because they were warm-blooded, needed to cluster to- gether and thus developed racial instincts and the need of mutual help and companionship.1 If one were to attempt a bold, comprehensive, systematic construction of a theory of the world based on what Bastian calls natural thinking, made up of thoughts nearest to sense, conforming to Avanarius's law of easiest and most economical mentation and including a pedagogy, a cult, and a most natu- ral because most naive religion, perhaps he might well attempt to do so by developing and coordinating the suggestions, now scattered and ineffective, of this theme. Heraclitus, the obscure thinker of Ephesus, whose fragments since Lasalle have been composed and rearranged like sibylline leaves in many ways and made to teach many things, represents, some think, the highest product of indigenous Greek thought before the So- cratic period started on the alien, politically motivated, quest of ineluctable foundation on which to rebase the crumbling state. Beywater, Schuster, Bernays, Patrick, and, above all, Teichmuller, have re-revealed some of the grand features of his system, as geologists suggest the vague outlines of vast mountains now worn away, from the hints of many clinal and anticlinal strata. Both modern science and genetic psychology supply new hints as to what is partly lost and partly might have been, or indeed may yet be when the scientific imagination supplements facts by heroic hypotheses, as Plato supplemented his positive teachings by the great myths which still so appeal to the heart and in later theological ages had more influence than even his doctrines.