As the sun was daily secreted out of the earth, leaving it a little colder and darker, but reabsorbed at night, so the soul is a fiery particle secreted out of nature and returning to it at death; its activity a " degree of burning," glowing, kin- dling, its culture a second sun arising from unconsciousness as 1 A. Sutherland: Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct; London, 1898; chaps, iii to v, and also x. See also the suggestion that if man were to become extinct, birds have most potentiality of taking their place at the head of the animal kingdom.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 19 l the physical sun from the earth. All things may follow the " way down " (" the death of fire is to become air, that of air to become water, that of water to become earth," or that of steam to become water, and of water to become ice), or the way up in successive eons with reversion at some epochal era; so the light of reason may " burn high or burn low," as sense and matter prevail and we become sarcous, or as spirit and wisdom predominate we may be slowly transmuted, first into great men, then into deity, " or die the fiery death," for there is no rupture of continuity and we are homoousia with both ex- tremes. Then perhaps we may again one day say with Herac- litus, " If one wander through all ways he will not reach the limits of the soul, in so great depths does it hide," which Tren- delenburg interprets to mean that the soul has unlimited power to know all because it is»of the same nature as all things.
This philosopheme took the next step beyond the myths, and its pedagogic relations to our thermodynamic world are strikingly suggestive of those of youth to maturity. To eval- uate each of these stages as prelusion and preparation is a great and real task that genetic psychology has yet before it. Till it is solved there will be waste and loss in teaching, and what is worse, waste and loss in the pupil's life.
VIII. Man's body affords abundant proof of his pelagic origin. After the vertebrae appear in the human embryo, it can not be determined for some time whether it is to be a fish, reptile, or quadruped. At one stage the human brain, as De Varigny first pointed out, is like that of a fish, but if it is to be that of a man, the development goes on. His heart is first two-chambered, like a fish's. Man has gills, which are later slowly metamorphosed into lungs and a double circulation es- tablished. In human monsters the gill-clefts are sometimes not closed in the neck, and in many children their traces can be seen as lighter spots. As the embryo grows, one of these slits is transformed into the thymus and probably into the thyroid gland. Dohrn thinks man's mouth was developed by the fusion of a pair of them and the olfactory organs from another pair; that the eye muscles are remnants of gill muscles; and most agree that the middle and outer ear, the Eustachian tube and tympanum, and perhaps even the external ear which occa- sionally crops out in the neck, are derived from them.
I92 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE If this be so, it is plain that at that stage it is important that the gill-slits be well developed, lest otherwise all these or- gans which arise from them be imperfect — a fact which is also a parable of very high and wide signification in the field of education. At the gill-slit period of human life, man is at the stage of his very ancient progenitors, who once lived a pelagic life when there was nothing but water over the earth's surface. There is, of course, no reason to think that if removed from the mother's body at this stage the very young man could swim away like a fish, if placed in water, as do the embryos of the mountain salamander atra, if cut out from the mother at the tadpole stage, although if brought forth at full term they drown when placed in water. If the soul is as old as the body, we should expect to find some pelagic vestiges in it, although they be more or less effaced in childhood or reduced like the remnant of the nictitating membrane of the eye of the fish found in man. Let us glance at the evidence.
1. Men and children have some psychomotor phenomena which, to say the least, admit of interpretation as atavisms of the old aquatic life. Mumford 1 found that if a babe a few days old was held face downward with only hands and feet touching the floor, it made pecul- iar paddling or swimming movements which would have propelled it through the water. The elbows open and the palm is pushed in a slow, rhythmic flexion and extension, in series of two or three move- ments at a time, interrupted by pauses, and very like those of loco- motion seen in aquaria. These movements he interpreted as vestiges of watery life.
2. In children and even adults among many automatisms we find swaying from side to side, or forward and backward, not infrequent.2 This suggests the slow oscillatory movements used by fish in swim- ming or maintaining their position in currents of water. In extreme cases these movements are very pronounced, prolonged, and may even become imperative and exhaust the energy of the body. I knew a weak-minded girl in an asylum who rocked all day despite efforts to restrain her, and died apparently from exhaustion thus caused. The cradle and especially the rocking-chair may become almost a psycho- sis. This is often unconscious, as during study. We see it in the rocking or back-and-forth movements of many large animals confined in cages, in nearly all of the cat family, bears, elephants, etc., and sometimes in smaller vertebrates. The fact that these automatisms 2 See Lindley, Automatism, op. cit.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 193 are generally increased by fatigue favors the aquatic theory of their origin, because fatigue is a temporary remission of control by the higher and later centers, and is a reversion to lower and more primi- tive conditions. We may assume with Bolton * that " all automatic as well as expressive movements are weakened repetitions of those that were once of use."
3. Tapping with a wrist movement or with the fingers, nodding, sometimes intensified in chorea and paralysis agitans, and the habit of trotting with the foot or leg, are thought by Bolton to be perhaps also thus explained. Fish, of course, make larger movements of the tail and body and finer ones with the fins, but while we do not know the origin of these latter movements, this explanation must be re- garded as perhaps even more hypothetical for these than for the other movements, all of which are yet far from actual demonstration as pelagic survivals.
4. Many movements and experiences, traces of which long persist in memory, with perhaps some morphological basis may be transmit- ted for many generations* without reappearing because their proper stimulus is lacking or because repressed by higher centers. But in disease or sleep which functionally remove the latter, these old mem- ories or functions may be set free. If the higher and newer centers are destroyed, events long forgotten sometimes reappear. The decay of memory begins with the new and less organized, and passes to the old, so that we sometimes have glimpses of a far-off paleopsychic basis or substrate. In sleep, which is a kind of decapitation of higher functions, ancient ancestral experiences crop out. Very common among these, as dream statistics show, are floating, hovering, gliding, with utter independence of gravity; we swing high or low with the same freedom that we move horizontally, and these nightmares are almost always associated with a differentiated respiratory rhythm. We gasp, or breathe deep and long. One of the present writer's most per- sistent dream experiences was that, by holding the breath and con- trolling it in a peculiar way, he could rise from the ground and float through the air by slight movements of the limbs and body. So urgent and repeated was this experience that he has many times awaked with a sense projected for some moments into waking life that he could now demonstrate to his friends the astounding trick of levitation over houses and fields at will. Similar experiences occur in many a dream census, when the subject swoops up and down, glides over hills and valleys, or can leap enormous distances. Now, as lungs have taken the place of swim-bladders, these unique hovering experiences of sleep suggest that here traces of a function have survived their known structure. Our ancestors floated and swam far longer than they have had legs, and why may the psyche not retain traces of this as the body does its rudimentary organs? It may be that these are some of the 1 Hydro-Psychoses; Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1899, vol. x, pp. 171-227.
194 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE oldest strata or elements of our psychic life, a reminiscent echo of the sea which was our primeval home and mother.
5. The statistics of suicide show that women choose this method much more often than men, and that at some periods and in some lands they choose it in preference to any and perhaps even all other methods. This is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the sexes. Woman's body and soul is phyletically older and more primi- tive, while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always more inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw them- selves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Ellis thinks drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein women are becoming more womanly. Now, if we sup- pose that fatigue or racial exhaustion or decay removes permanently or temporarily the control of higher centers, and that this allows a revival of the old love for and power of aquatic conditions, we have a suggestion for the explanation of the " drawing power " of water. The fear of it came later, as adjustment to land conditions made it more dangerous. This is normally overbalanced, as in the case of Comte, who in a fit of madness plunged into the water. The acquired love of swimming is a later philophobic adjustment. The spe- cific gravity of water resists but does not check movement, and tends to slow everything down toward passive movements. Prose, poetry, and myth have described these fascinations and peopled sea and stream with mythic creatures, both terrifying and captivating.1 The problem, whether there is any paleopsychic race element, is as inevitable as it is unanswerable. For one I am convinced that there is as much evidence of a specific " drawing power " or love of water as there now is, since the abandonment of a specific hydro- phobia, of a special aversion to it. Some can hardly bathe without an almost imperative impulse to plunge in forever, as if to go back to an old love. " Take me into your arms, O sea, away from the care and pain of life; I have always loved you more than the hard and bruising earth. Let me float and toss and wave in your embrace, and finally melt into the wild, wide ocean," is a sentiment not without some kinship to the religious motive of pantheistic absorption.
6. Children are phyletically even older than women, and after the first shock and fright most of them take the greatest delight in water. The shore where these forms first emerged and became am- phibian, to which many land forms return to lay eggs or rear their young, is no less than a passion to children. As Kline has shown, it accounts for a large proportion of all truancies. To paddle, splash, swim, and sun sometimes constitutes almost a hydroneurosis, and chil- dren pine all winter and live only for the next summer at the sea.
1 A Study of Fears; Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1897, vol. viii, pp. 147-249.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 195 It is a grievous loss if they are near water and can not go in, and lazy children walk great distances to swim, and sometimes go in many times a day. In some cases frequent danger, almost to the point of drowning, can not wean them. Cold does not deter; the very touch of water on the skin is rapture and exhilaration. If not a pond or river or brook, a puddle or gutter is sought, and played in even in severe storms. If boys can not swim, they raft and sail and fish; dabbling and sozzling in pails, pans, and cisterns, or splashing through the mud, frisking or capering through the rain with headgear and perhaps clothes off, is high glee. Alas for the child who has not access to a beach! and nowhere in the world perhaps are children so happy or in their element as when there, if under favorable conditions. It would seem as if some children loved to be wet for the mere sake of it. Sometimes the impulse to plunge in is so strong that they do so with clothes on. Others older or less active can sit by the hour, see- ing and hearing the movements of water in sea or stream. The best demonstration of the fact of this hydrophilia is the amount of cold, of first horror, often intensified by fancy and even superstition, real or imagined danger, and the occasional association with smother-feel- ing that it will overcome. The joy of going barefoot is never so in- tense as when it is possible to wade, and the boy of twelve who de- clared that he loved water like a fish, and knew no boy who did not and was a different being when away from it, was typical.
7. Many forms of animal life which have had long experience on the land, have yielded to the attraction of the sea and have become backsliders to marine habits, and their quadrupedal organization has slowly lapsed to fish-like traits. So completely have they forsaken the land that they are often called fishes. They still breathe with lungs, and must periodically come to the surface. Their heart is four- chambered, like quadrupeds; they bring forth living young, and do not lay eggs like fish; they are mammals, and suckle their offspring; they have rudimentary teeth, legs, and pelvis, that do not mature or have been metamorphosed into analogy with fins and tail. The whale is, of course, the best-known type, and must have lived a long time on land; but the traces of its terrestrial life have been largely effaced. Here, too, belong porpoises, dolphins, seals, walruses, while the polar bear, sea-otter, penguin, the sea-lion, beaver, duck-billed platypus, web-footed opossum, dugong, manatee, oceanic turtle, sea-snake, and many others, have retrogressed in various degrees from the land type. Limbs are lost or are being modified into paddles or flippers, and the chief changes have always been in the least typical structures, and thus less strongly inherited. The whale has acquired his blubber for heat; the skin, claws, teeth, eyes, shape of head, are modified. The lungs are often enlarged as the animal acquires the power of re- maining under water. Reversion increases size by reducing the energy required in locomotion and in securing food; while the loss of the pel- vis enables the young to be born larger and more mature, and with less injury to the parent.
I96 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE To the simple animisms of children water lives, sings, laughs, moans, beckons, and often talks in words and phrases of which Bolton collected many. It is roused to truculence and anger by storms and rocks, is treacherous and wily. They prattle their secrets to it, scold and offer it gifts, imperson- ate springs, fountains, streams, and individual waves, and their credulity in all the water people from nixies, kelpies, and mer- maids to fabulous monsters, and in fairy submarine castles, cities, gem-bestrewn grots, knows little bounds, as the litera- ture on the subject copiously shows.
Youth works a sea change and the hydropsychoses strike inward. The curve of runaways to go to sea rises steeply, and a sailor's life now makes its strongest appeal. The sea sug- gests eternity, as it invites thoughts to the horizon, and is eloquent of things which they " can ne'er express but can not all conceal." To be near and hear its polyphonous voice com- forts, soothes, rests, relaxes, and its many aspects mirror inner moods. It draws away and away, and one would sail on and on perhaps to the moon and stars and, with Flaubert, revolt at science that has set limits to old ocean's stream that in Ho- meric days not only flowed round all but joined the sky itself. A friend has collected, from youthful preferences, over two hundred hymns that teach the great lessons of religion by aquatic tropes. Some, like the Zunis when they saw it for the first time, must pray to or beside it. In place of the childish pas- sion for playing in and with it, and beside the bathing craze, arises a love of gazing and meditating alone. Not only does the curve of boating take a sharp upward curve, but it seems instinct with a mighty and quasi divine power, and the tides, floods, currents, waves, storms, shallows, depths, and glassy transparency of the sea mirror and even make moods. The soul would be as boundless, pure, profound, persevering, as it, depth answering depth, and as the voices of extinct gener- ations are heard for the first time, feels itself as old and as full of buried treasures and secrets, or it is truculent, treach- erous, wily, pacing the shingly beach to and fro, or falling back with baffled rage, or at its priest-like task of absolution. Thus feeling ebbs and flows, and the current of spontaneous thought must go on forever. As if the rudimentary aquatic organs in the body had psychic resonances and sympathies ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 197 with it, the sea, the mother of life, wakens the soul to new appreciation of all that it has meant in literature, myth, and rites. Love is " born of the deep and comes up with the sun from the sea," billows " break like a bursting heart and die in foam "; like a shell the soul ever whispers and murmurs of the main what of horror or charm fills its depths since old Silenus and the Tritons settled back into them. In the normal soul there is now an outcrop of the same psychic strata which once created and gave life and sacredness to lustrations, bap- tisms, oracles, water deities, philosophemes like those of Thales, who made water the source of all things, or of Heraclitus, who saw in vapor, water, and ice the key to the universe which was constantly fluxing up or down the long way of rarefication and condensation between ether and rock. So, too, the stream is in a hundred ways the lype of life. The soul is hydrotropic, and this is the sacred hour of opportunity for bringing these dim and dumb molimena of the soul to their issue, for wedding the individual promptings to the best that literature, art, his- tory, of the races have to offer in a way that makes teaching at its best such a high and sacred calling. Empiricist as I am in insisting that everything possible should be traced to a source in individual experience, I can not read these youthful ebulli- tions without inclining to believe in residual traces that hark back through ages, and that the soul is still marked like our body by vestiges of pelagic life. Here, too, if it is dangerous to believe, it is no less so to disbelieve.1 IX. It would seem that nothing could be farther from human sympathy than rocks, stones, and minerals of the earth's lithosphere. Yet hard, cold, and dark as they are, they have played a very important role in shaping and expressing the human soul. Many, when they think of matter, image rock or earth of various kinds, and we owe to it much of our impressions of solidity, while even the idea of substance in many minds is in close rapport with impressions derived from this source, so utterly irrelevant to modern mineralogy and geology. Menhirs, dolmens, cairns, barrows, cromlechs, topes, swastika of many kinds, Druid circles like Stonehenge, altars, hearths, 1 Ueber den Einfluss der See auf die englische Literatur. Drei Studien. Th. A. Fischer. Gotha, 1892.
198 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE lintels, bethels, and the traditions and customs spun about the Woden stone, through a hole in which hands were placed when fidelity was sworn; the stone of St. Fillan, where, up to 1 798, the sick were healed; the holy stones of Ireland, against which maidens leaned to see their future husbands; rocking stones; shrine pillars; stones of witness, like that at Mizpah; the black stone schippeda at Emesa; wishing stones; stones of unction, libation, taboo, bloody rites, of judgment, of impregnation; king stones; sentinel stones; the famous Blarney stone; monu- ment worship in India; the bounding stone, symbol of Mer- cury; pentile stones in France; stones of mystic shape, mark- ings, and charms; touchstones; natural magnets; lodestone mountains, (Edipus myths in many forms — all these suggest something analogous to a stone age for psychology, which has almost nothing in common with the industrial Stone age of the anthropologist. Savages often think their sacred stones move about at night. In many parts of Palestine, especially the eastern, the archeologist finds almost no other remains of the ancient Hebrew or pre-Hebrew cults.1 Very strong and wide-spread is the primitive belief, perhaps most clearly seeh in Tahiti, that stones, especially if peculiar in any way, have souls that go to the gods if they are broken. St. Arnobius was wont to beg a blessing for every anointed stone. The Council of Toledo, A. D. 68 1, decreed punishment for stone worshipers, and in 789 Charlemagne condemned them. Many of these ancient relics, erected because of vows, or to crown tumuli of unknown purpose, perhaps alined to perpetuate astronomic lore, etc., are products of a psychosis now almost extinct in adults, but relegated to ineffectual child- hood.
Still more interesting because revealing a still closer rapport with the higher development of the soul is the lore of precious stones.2 Most of these now worn as ornaments were once 1 See C. R. Conder: Heth and Moab. Explorations in Syria in 1881, espe- cially chapter vii. Also, Survey of Eastern Palestine, vol. i, p. 302 et seg. J. O'Neill: The Night of the Gods, i, pp. 99-188. Lubbock: Origin of Civilization, first ed., p. 204 et seq. The Worship of Stones in France, by P. Sibillot. Am. Anthropologist. 1902, pp. 76-107. Mystical Properties of Gems, by Wirt Tassin; Annual Report Smithsonian Inst., 1900, pp. 558-588.
2 See G. F. King: Folklore of Precious Stones. Int. Cong. Anthrop., Chicago Exposition, 1893. Also William Jones: History and Mythology of Precious Stones; London, 1880.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 199 charms, and their names often suggest what they meant to the heart. The madstone drew poison; amber, once thought a stone, was concentrated tears of birds or electrides and is still sometimes worn for sore throat; the carbuncle was sacred to the angel Amoriel; the touchstone was a test; the bloodstone stanched; the famous bezoar from the kidney of the Arabian antelope was a charm against poison; the sapphire against apoplexy; arrow-heads were fairy darts; moonstones waxed and waned with the moon, were clear on fortunate and dim on unlucky days; the lodestone made invisible, cured headache and love, and is still sold to conjure with in voodoo charms; hydrophane, as it absorbed liquids, became opaque or trans- parent with psychic correspondences; eye agate cured sight dis- tempers; the chrysoberyl or cat's-eye drove away evil spirits; the Cabot stone prophesied weather; opals, beautiful as they are, even yet have limited sale because they bring bad luck; while obsidian, jade, chalcedony, carnelian, onyx, sardonyx, sard, amethyst, malachite, tourmaline, draconite from the head of a dragon, aetites from the head of an eagle, and many others, were centers of superstition or symbols of sentiment, were worn as pendants, amulets, brooches, rings, and had a meaning