10. We are told that by the methods of sexual selection the female has made the male according to her own tastes, that man is always passing woman's examination, that not only a large portion of his conduct that is addressed to her, but very much which is not con- sciously so, does not escape her keen observation and unconscious merit-marking; and so conversely in other and manifold ways man has made woman. Psychology is lately learning more and more of the wide range and great power of this intersexual biotonic stimulus. This, too, has its religiolis analogue in the relations of man to God. Each in a sense and to a degree makes the other in his own image. Man is ever unconsciously drawn into likeness of the object of his worship, who is always an exemplar, whose perfections he would imi- tate and emulate.
11. Nor must it be forgotten that many of these analogies are best seen, not from the masculine, but from the feminine side. The Christian loves as the woman does, quite as much, if not more than as the man does. There is quiet, retirement, fond contemplation of the image and perfections of the dear one. There is passivity, inward- ness, and virtues cultivated in secret seen by Heaven alone in order to draw down its benison or its favor. Heavenly love brings its griefs, sorrows, disappointments, and anxieties, its hope deferred, its hours when nothing is possible but placid resignation that can not act or strive.
12. Once more, love and religion are analogous in that both can vivify and lend the immense influence of their vitality to almost any and every act or object, can become gross, material, eccentric, and desiccated, and yet in periods of reawakening can slough off as dross all accretions, withdraw into central heights, find reenforcement in involution, and from thence develop newer forms of objective ex- pression. Perhaps nearly, if not quite, all forms are deciduous and need to fall away at times and be replaced by the new growths of spring-time. The soul which can worship or kindle love in every act or object needs to break away and fall back upon its own resources at times appointed, in order to realize and increase its own inner forces, as reproduction brings regeneration.
Such parallels might be easily multiplied. Both love archaic phrases that are conventionalized, but antiquated and absurd if scru- tinized in the light of modern knowledge. The medieval courts of love adjudicated lovers' quarrels and solved knotty points of manners 300 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE as if they were holy liturgy. The agape or love feast of the early Church; canticles like that of St. Francis, who sang that he burned, languished, and pined of the wounds of love divine, would swim in love's sweet sea, was its slave bound in chains of strong desire, would die bound in its furnace sunk in love's sweet swoon, etc.; hymns and songs from that of Solomon down; lives of celestial erotomaniacs like St. Theresa; the analogies between marriage as an institution and the Church; the circumstance that pathology in either sphere is liable to involve that of the other, that true religion is far harder and rarer in childhood and senescence, that religion is the chief corrective and regulator of degraded love — each of these might be heads of new chapters showing in detail their unity.
Using this key, we find that just as earthly love is at core a mo- ment of ravishing joy which created all the widening irradiations, made all the gorgeous plumage, created song and all the complicated phenomena of animal courtship, that has brought into being the whole range of secondary sexual qualities and their uses, and made the world beauteous with color and odor, as well as, perhaps, in- spired art and all the esthetic world for man, so religion has as its nucleus rare and ravishing moments of communion with the highest experiences which abide long with us and are worth a life of toil and sacrifice to attain, but which irradiate outward into a good life through an endless range of rites, creeds, asceticisms, and cults for the body and for the soul, perhaps idolatrous and pagan superstitions, and fetish worship; yet all these are changing habiliments of heav- enly love put on and taken off to fit the exigencies of race, culture, environment. Both have their transports of bliss and rapture; both have their pangs of pain, fear, despair; both alternate between a feel- ing of absolute dependence and that of absolute freedom, between the sentiment of the eternal worth of the individual, when life abounds and may be violent, seeking to take the kingdom of heaven by force, and abject Massochistic humility which longs to be servile and to be passively seized and borne away by heteronomous powers. Both love and religion delight in incense and swinging censers that appeal to the sense of smell; both are liable to the extremes of orgy and sub- sequent apathetic reaction. The sarcous and celestial erotics both have their flagellations and their penances, and their beauteous vest- ments. Both have their prelude of danger, uncertainty, and possible loss. Both are borne up on the wings of music and song, and both have their intonation and enchantments. Both worship and pray, and readjust the individual will to that of the adored being. Both have their manuals of devotion. Both hunger for a larger, fuller life, and have their pathology, fetishism, and formalism, their hypocrisies, their periods of revival, and their methodisms.
True and deep religious experience is almost impossible before adolescence, and disturbances in either sphere are now liable to affect the other. The birthday of the strongest passion is the day of the greatest need of religion, and is also the period when the calentures ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3O1 of both are in greatest danger of becoming confused one with the other, so that devotional and passional states may become mutually provocative. If we see how the lower rouses the higher in some of the experiences of the medieval saints, monks and nuns, and other ascetics, we also see how the appeal to the higher may rouse the lower in some of the phenomena of modern revivalism, especially at camp- meetings. Both are liable in youth to be predominantly emotional, and the contiguity of emotional states is then most liable to produce extension of excitement to other areas by contagion.1 Both are often at their best and purest at adolescence. It is only in later life that their spheres become more distinct.
On the other hand, their differences are, as the world better knows, many and great. The object of divine love is not sensuous or transi- tory, but spiritual and abiding. Precious as is the love of persons in itself and for its own sake, it is a symbol of that which is higher. If up to a certain degree of fervor, varying greatly with individuals, each strengthens and normalizes the other, beyond this point too great intensity of either interferes with the other. Some may put all the ardor meant for husband and wife, and all the devotion due to chil- dren, into the love and service of God and of a future heavenly state, while nothing so emasculates piety as base or excessive eroticism. Plato, Spinoza, and many others, have shown that there is an in- tellectual love of the divine. God, however conceived, whether as incarnate or as the Stoic soul of the world, is an object that appeals to very different sentiments and faculties, and in a very different way from those evoked by a human personality; prayer, worship, and service take on new qualities and directions, and where the Divine Being be conceived as of the same sex as the worshiper or unsexed, the above analogies pale in significance.
I. In its most fundamental sense, conversion is a natural, normal, universal, and necessary process at the stage when life pivots over from an autocentric to an heterocentric basis. Childhood must be selfish in the sense that it must be fed, shel- tered, clothed, taught, and the currents of its environment set 1The first impulse of genius, says Lombroso,1 is often due to beauty or to love. Petrarch became a poet when he was fourteen, upon seeing his Laura. Impression- ability in general, as is plain for many cases, is now at its apogee. Youth is in a state of latent explosibility. Effects, especially in the realm of religion, are often instantaneous, like a sudden revelation disproportionate to their causes. Interme- diate states come to the front temporarily and perhaps permanently. Emotionality is extremely unstable and easily influenced. The sexual psychopath, especially the fetishist, is often made so by a single vivid impression at this susceptible age, when special incidents are not only vividly and permanently impressed upon th« mind, but become formative centers.
1 Alienist and Neurologist, April and August, 1902.
302 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE toward and not from it. Again, infancy is generic and abounds in rudimentary physical and psychic traits com- mon to many forms of higher animal as well as of human life. In the adolescent infancy of the soul a similar totalizing tend- ency appears on a higher plane. Youth seeks to be, know, get, feel all that is highest, greatest, and best in man's estate, circumnutating in widening s.weeps before it finds the right object upon which to climb. There are interpreted antici- pations of greater joy which only true marriage and parent- hood of body and soul can satisfy, foregleams of heroic achievement and secret " excelsior " ambitions. It is the glo- rious dawn of imagination, which supplements individual lim- itations and expands the soul toward the dimensions of the race. Some girls want to be romantically good and paragons of piety and beauty. Occasionally a criminaloid boy secretly resolves to commit all the crimes and vices ever heard of. The mannerisms and affectations of superiors are put on. There are dreams of leadership, victory, and splendor amid the plaudits of an admiring world. All these more or less flickering and iridescent trailing clouds of glory usher in a new inner dawn, when everything seems turning to gold at the touches of fancy, and that only poetry can ever describe, which it has not yet adequately done, but which I believe it is its very highest function to do. The flood-gates of higher heredity are open. Before this age children often resemble one parent or one side of the house, etc.; but now the traits of body or soul of the other parent or side appear, and the less remote forebears are heard from, a vast cloud of wit- nesses, so that it is no wonder, especially where ethnic stocks are mingled, that cross-fertilization follows its law and pro- duces variety within the individual soul. Hence prepotent tendencies of diverse kinds clash or combine, as it were, at all angles and with all degrees of mutual arrest or reenforce- ment. It is thus well for adolescents to have a series of in- terests, fevers, and even flings, because to find a life voca- tion in the first new field that opens has been well called as dwarfing as for a plant to go to seed from the first pair of cotyledons. Now, too, come the reading crazes, the first attempts at poetry, dramatic or other arts, ideas of wealth, service, fame, and vows of sublime deeds. No age has such ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3°3 many-sided interests, and all without distraction. Nothing human is alien, and all this stretching of the soul to larger dimensions is nature's way of liberal culture to full-orbed per- fection. The ego would, in Guyau's phrase, expand itself to the uttermost, and act all parts in the Comedie Humaine. If unchecked, in later life these ideals tend to exploit to the utter- most every sense and all experiences, to utilize all the maxims of expediency, like Marius the Epicurean, or to maximize in- dividuality, like Goethe, and incline more to the best Hellenic than to the Hebrew or Christian types of life.
But another voice is soon heard in the soul, which says: Renounce and serve, life is short, powers and opportunities are limited, suffering is needful to perfection, so obey, find the joy of sacrifice, get only to give, live for others, subor- dinate the will to live to love, or to offspring, (Thus the inevitable hour comes when all these vague masses of ances-J tral reminiscences which our very heredity suggests, and which are so much vaster than any individual life can express, must submit to what often seems the injustice or even the pathos of slowly progressive separate personal definiteness. The larger natura non naturata of the soul must gradually decline to dim subliminal regions, and the hunger for a more and fuller life and the desire to have the broadest possible experience can not be gratified in our own sublunary exist- ence. This suggests posterity as well as ancestry, or else an- other life, as a kind of psychokinetic equivalent and a substi- tute where these promises, bankrupt here, will be redeemed. 'Hence this is the great opportunity for the teachers of religion, of the family, and of social life. These earlier, tender dreams nursed in secret, the incubation of which inclines to reticence and to solitude, which should be not only respected but favored, are sure to pale or be shattered one by one by closer contact with the real world. The sense of imperfection and incompleteness which inevitably supervenes is one cause of the mild melancholy so symptomatic of this climacteric period. The ulterior law of service and self-sacrifice, which seems at first to be contradictory of all that has preceded, begins to loom up, and the prolonged period of readjustments and sub- ordinations begins. Henceforth the race, not the self, must become supreme.
304 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE All are thus born twice, once as individuals and once as representatives of the species. I Quetelet sagely says that the best measure of the state of civilization in a nation is the way in which it achieves its revolutions. As it becomes truly civi- lized they cease to be sudden and violent, and become gradually transitory without abrupt change. The same is true of that individual crisis which physiology describes as adolescence, and of which theology formulates a spiritual aspect or potency called regeneration and conversion. True religion is nor- mally the slowest because the most comprehensive kind of growth, and the entire ephebic decade is not too long and is well spent if altruism or love of all that is divine and human comes to assured supremacy over self before it is ended. Later adolescence merges the lower into the higher social self. Com- plex as the process is, a pivotal point is somehow discernible where the ego yields to the alter. Normal and imperceptible as this evolution is ideally, the transition is in fact the chief antithesis in all the human cosmos. While it involves trans- formation in nearly every sphere of thought, conduct, and sen- timent, it may occur in one field after another, and be so slow in each field as to occupy the longest and fullest lifetime and then be incomplete. Indeed, this change fills and alone gives unity to history, for Christianity marks the same pivotal point in ethnic adolescence where self-love merges in resignation and renunciation into love of man. Religion has no other function than to make this change complete, and the whole of morality may be well defined as life in the interest of the race, for love of God and love of man are one and inseparable.
Even Huxley says the cosmic and the ethical processes are antagonistic and we must resist the former. Perhaps the irenicon or harmony between the two is for us what temperance and the golden mean were for Aristotle. Seeley thinks Christianity inadequate and that we should add, as it were, two more religions — that of the beauti- ful and that of the true, otherwise we shall feel " that the great companion is dead," and that " the sun shines from empty heavens and lights a sullen earth," and the grudge of artists against morality, and that of science against religion, will not be overcome. One of the chief functions of morals and religion is to adjust these instincts. Happily the best sense of the world revolts at both extremes, and if they were really irreconcilable we should almost despair of human nature. It is incalculable gain that we now see that they are not ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3°5 disparate, but only belong to different strata of the soul, and culminate in different periods of life. First, life is ascendent, and then, at the period of involution, no one is harmonized with the law of his own being who does not feel the passion of surrender.
II. When upon this background of normality, which is still discernible as the basis of.xmr unfallen nature, is devel- oped the pathology of sin, both the struggles and changes are profoundly intensified, especially the negation motives. How real and potent this factor is, especially its sexual note, we saw in Chapters VI and VII. From vague impulsions toward completeness and a moral life essentially objective, youth is often smitten with a sudden sense of wrong within as if con- science now came suddenly into function. Introspection di- vides the soul into en ethical dualism. Reflection on right and wrong in both the concrete and abstract brings home the fact that general good-will and intention coexist with evil in thought, word, and deed. The new moral world into which the soul now breaks is a vast and complex one.
Kozle found some score or more German words expressing childish and youthful faults than those specifying the seven hundred and forty-nine diseases standardized by the English Pharmacological Society. Most of all these, as well as the seven deadly sins, the candid soul can detect, at least in germ, in itself. There is pride, superbia, by which man fell when the Tempter promised him that he should be as God, which boasts, kills sympathy, leads to excessive adornment of the body, arrogance of wealth, beauty, talents, and birth, and which makes meekness and humility so hard; avarice, the root of evil, that makes cruelty, lust of conquest, slavery, covet- ousness, and gambling, till men coin and sell their very souls for lucre, although it is happily mainly a vice of the old and not of the young, and can be best safeguarded in youth by teaching that wealth is but a means to higher ends and that the middle station between poverty and riches is best; envy, or pain at another's good, very distinct from Nemesis as sor- row at the prosperity of the wicked and joy in their fall, which prompts murder, slander, gossip, and detraction, and kills love of merit for its owrn sake; appetite, which may take the form of gluttony, for which the later Roman Empire was 306 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE so notorious, or drunkenness, next the most insidious vice of modern youth, for which even partial pledges not to treat or drink except at meals may save many; wrath, which is sinful if in excess or wrongly directed, and easily degenerates to peevishness and irritability at trifles; laziness, sloth, or ac- cidie,1 psyche torpor, which predisposes to discouragement, Weltsdimerz and pessimism, the opposites of courage and strenuousness; and last and chiefly, luxury or licentious- ness, which prompts insidiously to sin in thought, word, and deed.
These seven sins, which the Catholic Church thought most virulent, and from which it held all the others could be de- rived, which were often elaborately personified, perhaps as dancing in hideous mien about a " lusty juventus " or con- tending with the seven cardinal virtues as to which of them should rule him, are all of them easily found if the soul is once morally introverted and enters upon a rigid self-exami- nation to inventory them. The self-revelation that results is often appalling. There is no more innocence, but self-accusa- tion and indictment in countless forms. To be under con- viction of sin was the first of the old formal steps that ended in conversion. This stage has its familiar litany. There is nothing good in us, all is corrupt, we are dead in trespasses and sin. All we do, think, say, feel, is evil, to which we are inordinately prone. At first wre hold ourselves personally re- sponsible, and later realize that our nature is corrupt, that we are conceived and born in iniquity, that it is a taint that dates from the origin of man. We are sold, led captive, en- chained, poisoned to the heart with its virus, bound to a body of death meriting only destruction. The descriptions of this stage, sometimes even in Puritan environments, have been often superlative and even yellow, so that if the emotional utterances of "saints concerning their own ethical state were taken literally they would be everywhere cast out of society as moral lepers.
The crude psychology of the Church describes, too, a kind of counter conversion of souls that glory in their own utter iniquity, and this was the signature of diabolism and witch- 1 James Stalker: The Seven Deadly Sins. London, igoo.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3°7 craft. Evil was exultant, accepted as good, as modern litera- ture describes monsters who would exploit and exhaust every possibility of vice and crime and diligently extirpate every virtue and even semblance of it they could detect in their own souls. The sense of sin is the most intense degree of self-consciousness, and jaded and inverted natures, like Bau- delaire's, have found the extreme of moral titillation in de- scribing an au rebours world, where all that was worst was regarded as best, everything most holy was the purest vicious- ness, and flagitiousness was made the supreme object of pious aspiration and endeavor. Every rupture with virtue gave new exultation, and lives have been solemnly devoted to sin, as its saints and apostles have vowed to cultivate only " the flowers of hell." Happily there are not two different king- doms in the moral world both alike primitive and organic, and hence this is psychologically impossible. The morbid tis- sue of disease is a product of growth perverted. It develops only by the momentum of normal vitality. There are no in- dependent morbific principles, but only symptom-groups of decay, as death is simply the absence of life, and all persona- tions of it are descriptions of the realm poetic, so that depravity can never from its very nature be total, so essentially negative and self-destructive is it. Goodness, like life, tends to survival, and evil is self-annihilating. Manicheism is as heterodoxal to evolution as it has been, since Augustine, to Christianity.
y"rhus the first and most immediate reaction in the soul to this new sense of sin is pain, not pleasure. It expresses itself instinctively, and always in some of its many forms of regret -penitence, mourning, grief, compunction, remorse. It pricks, stings, burns, wounds, brings restlessness and anxiety, a sense of oppression, as under a heavy load. Psychalgia is in- tolerable, and a sense of pure pain, if not per se impossible, as some now argue, creates a tension that finds vent along lines of least resistance, which varies with individual diathesis. Sometimes physical symptoms of a convulsive or hysteroid type predominate, or the involution may be so deep as to in- hibit movement and cause the torpor of misery. While per- sonal and avoidable sins are most prominent in consciousness, a feeling of individual responsibility brings a sense of guilt 3°8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE into the foreground. Penalty is merited and feared, perhaps in the vague form of nameless apprehension at first, slowly taking on the definite imagery so familiar in sterner religious environments; Deity is offended, God's wrath and hate fan- cied, or a more impersonal justice violated, which must be not so much appeased as compensated. It is in these condi- tions that penance may become a veritable passion, and all forms of self-denial and mortification, flagellations, fasting, and exposure may become enthusiastic, that punitive venge- ance be meted out to the offending body or soul. The heart cries out for condign punishment; because merited it must be immediate, and if self-inflicted, there is added merit and a reenforcement of the new good resolutions. ^ XThus the fruits of a sense of sin are: i, pain; 2, guilt; 3, craving for just punishment; and now 4, confession. To proclaim what is bad in us is to exteriorize and alienate it. The soul judges and condemns what was a vital part of itself. The fission begins when we realize sin in our inmost selves; and to set it forth in words openly to others is a much further and often very costly step in its extradition. The psychology of the confession that leads on to forsaking is deep and com- plex. It exposes the penitent to censure and perhaps con- tempt, upsets the good name rather to be chosen than riches, brands as God's convict, and thus psychically isolates, and is a declaration of moral bankruptcy that humiliates ethical pride. By showing others how vile we seem to ourselves, and taking them behind the veil of conventionalities, Jre- straints, and hypocrisies which had disguised our leprosy, we find at once a certain relief proportionate to the strain these falsities had caused us, and some energy is freed for inner reconstruction. Again, the social pain of avowal of evil is so poignant and perhaps intolerable that it prompts to rebuild the reputation we have shattered or impaired. But this is not the most or best, for the very act of putting our sins into words