and acknowledging them to others means that the long-fes- tering sores have suppurated into consciousness and are now come to a head, broken and discharging, and healing processes are already under way. Our loathsomeness is itself incipient recovery. The rash and tetter of evil is salvative, and thus again we see that consciousness is a remedial process, a thera- ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3°9 peutic agent. The more vital a tissue, organ, or function the less conscious we are. of it, and the weaker or more decadent it is the more it comes to the front.
A fifth symptom-group in the pathology of the sin-sick soul is very grave, though not universal, when culpability for all witting and unwitting personal sins leads on to a sense of hereditary corruption, and we feel ourselves victims of an- cestral vice. This presents to the sense of responsibility its oldest and hardest problem, and has been the incentive to the boldest of all the theoretical constructions of speculative the- ology. The fact that we suffer for the sins of our forebears or mid-parents back to Adam, or the amphioxus or even amoeba, challenges every instinct of distributive justice, and has led more souls to negation, revolt, and despair than any other fact in the moral world. Repudiate all idea of justice and goodness at the helm of things, curse and die, is the all too obvious suggestion that unnumbered ingenuous hearts have taken. This is also the tap-root of pessimism and sensualism. The fall of man in the first was a mythopeic postulate to ex- plain the origin, and his restoration through the second Adam was a Pauline effort to explain, by a parallelism more rhe- torical than logical, a mode of extinction of the inherited taint of Eden. Here in our biological age, returns show that the youthful seeker after righteousness is often most enmeshed.
If there is a cure as vicarious as the infection, and accessible, on the easiest terms, to all, then there is no injustice to the individual, no matter how contaminated his blood. The ben- ison must be as nearly as possible the exact counterpart of the malison. This stupendous problem with which Paul grappled has yet had no other solution in the world save the Oriental one of resignation and renunciation.
Our Western and democratic demand to be judged solely on our own merits or demerits is a product of overblown Titanic heaven-storming individuality; and its demand to open the debt and credit account-book of life with a clean page is itself preposterous. Even if we could conceivably ap- ply antidotes for the evils we ourselves have brought upon our own nature, we can never hope to neutralize those of all our ascendents; while the very age of the human race as now conceived and our long prehuman and animal pedigree make the 3*° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE defects we inherit seem far more inveterate and helpless than they ever could before.
Harmatophobia is intensified by calamity that brings out the next world, prompting self-stupration and the misologism that loves to see reason collapse and often plunges the soul into deep melancholy and despair. Horror of sin may make self-mortification a frenzy. It was this that made Loyola and his disciples develop the me- chanics of devotion or self-immolation. We can not understand the satisfaction that came to many a saint by never eating enough; hold- ing stones in the mouth during Lent; saying the psalter in ice-water; in sleeping between corpses in a coffin or on a cross, and that never enough; exposing himself to gnats; wearing crowns of thorns; or the fanaticism that in the fourteenth century, as a result of the black death, made men flagellants and developed many a spiritual exercise. Thus the Marquise of Penalta was slowly possessed by the impulse to desert her adoring lover and bare her back to daily scourging by her maid. Men have rivaled each other in austerities, self-torture, and even martyrdom. Recluses cultivated a physical morality, saying the Church service one word at a breath; meditating on the hidden meanings of each syllable; thinking of saints while they ate; fixing the eye almost to the point of catalepsy on skulls or sacred symbols; living in the dark; kneeling, lying, praying in fantastic atti- tudes, seeking purity and expiation. They coquetted not only with hunger but with disease, forgetting that the first makes men irritable, and the second often devilish. In Chartreuse, inspired by St. Bruno, they vowed silence to all save God alone. They swore poverty and chastity; reduced the surface of contact with the world to its minimum to attain gnosis; " held the flesh to be the devil's knight," in order to put off the old man and his deeds, seeking to tame the carnal wolf, to guard the Lord's flock. They hoped to be perfect through suffer- ing, and in deliria of virtue strove for self-mastery, discipline, and penitential atonement, for this world is inversely as the other, and all this pain here will be rewarded by eternal joy.
Although Heinroth, the leading German authority on insanity in his day, defended with great philosophical acumen the proposition that all mental diseases are caused by sin, and Idler and Morel were somewhat inclined to the same opinion, these views fell into general neglect. More recently, however, Kraussold 1 has sought, with the resources of expert knowledge of insanity at his command, to establish a definite connection between melancholy and a sense of guilt, and to thus effect a renewed junction between medicine, religion, and phi- losophy which have been so long separated. He holds that the self- accusations so common in melancholia, and which have so long been thought to be imaginary, are often true and rest upon a basis of fact. Melancholiacs, he urges, often see their own lives truly; their self- 1 Kraussold: Melancholic und Schuld. 1884.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 311 reproaches are justified; they have been bad and sinned away their youth or manhood. These writers, like many modern pessimists, in- cline to the " luxury of woe " theory, and so consider mania and melan- cholia as less contrasted on the alghedonic scale than most have deemed them, but they rightly argue that it makes a great difference in the proper treatment of each case whether the sin is real or is the product of morbid fancy. Kraussold suggests that such cases now prefer to consult a physician rather than a clergyman, because it eases the conscience to be thought more sick than guilty. He made a com- mendable, if but partially successful, attempt to penetrate the extreme reticence which veils in such obscurity the causes of depressive states of mind in order to find in specific cases the sin at its core. Under the stimulus of a general sense of guilt patients examine all their lives and fix upon some petty real or fancied case, where, if they had done differently, dire results would have been avoided. This is often enormously magnified by the morbid emotional state and by friends; normal associations, habitual memories, and lapses of thought are powerless to reduce, the hypertrophied ideas or impressions. Of all delusions of depressive states, that of having committed some sin or error that is physiologically or judicially unpardonable, some think most common, and this is, perhaps, the most fit and adequate ex- pression of the depressed tone of consciousness. Even if hypochon- driacal disease or loss of property or reputation haunt the mind, this is often thought to be self-caused and therefore culpable, or an expression of retribution.
Although it is so extremely difficult to get at the mental states of melancholiacs that we are very far from having the desiderated statistics showing what percentage of cases have this genetic factor, we may ask, Who is free from a sense of sin, error, or imperfection? We all have our weaknesses, and if change of occupation or failure in business, or isolation, etc., free our thoughts from wonted channels, if disease weakens our nervous fiber, and especially if misfortune, afflic- tion, or sorrow arouse, as they always do (so animistic are we at bot- tom toward the universe), the question, "Was this deserved?" then remembered offenses long latent in memory often revive, the cate- gorical imperative is heard from, and the gnawings of conscience may deepen to remorse. Vain and wasteful though we are often told regrets are, their strength is one of the great factors of life. Not only grief, but atonement for the past, is as basal as the struggle for survival, and self-inflicted penalties of every conceivable form attest in man a real passion for punishment as a means of purification and deliverance, which in abnormal cases vents itself in fantastic modes of self-torture and even suicide. A sense of justice, one of the most generic expressions of the social instinct, however wrongly inter- preted in the past, always impels toward reparation, while all who are sympathetically acquainted with the vicious and criminal know that the " heavenly powers " are very real and often all-dominant in the errabund soul, and that despair may rouse some minds to frenzy 312 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and plunge others into apathy. Indeed, a sense of sin is only shown to be more vital by having some power to explain, as Jesus did to rule, the processes of those bereft of reason.
Kierkengaard, a theologian, had long before undertaken to treat the psychology of sin and conversion as resting essentially on the feeling of anxiety of which psychiatry now makes such comprehensive use.1 Older writers — Cullen, Boerhaave, Aretee, Trales, and others — have noted the tendency of depressive states of mind to be followed by euphoria and exaltation, and now Ziehen argues for a sequent stage of hyperthumia, or inordinate cheerfulness, in which most melancholiacs recover, while most of the rest pass over to mania. Bevan-Lewis thinks a depressive stage " precedes all forms of mental disease "; Fere 2 holds that anger in the insane is often a sthenic reaction to depression; and Magnan,3 in a masterly study, has laid great stress upon the tendency of melancholy with delusions of persecution to change to anger and perhaps homicidal impulses when the victim himself assumes the role of persecutor after reacting into more or less full-blown delusions of greatness; he thinks that sexual rhythm increases both the depth and extent of the denudation of the higher centers, and makes the euphorious states, when the inevitable reaction brings them on, all the more excessive and abandoned. It is in periodic and more specifically in circular types of insanity, however, that we find this tendency of pleasurable and painful states of mind to react into each other, best illustrated.4 Each has many forms and symptoms. Among periodic diseases those in which psychic symp- toms play a prominent part form the largest class. Kirn thinks most of them develop during adolescence, and that they are common again at the climacteric.6 The two extremes may or may not be separated by a clear and normal interval. Interesting, too, although not conclu- sive, is Koster's laborious statistical effort to show that these changes from exaltation to depression coincide with the approach and re- cession of the moon, which is from forty-seven to fifty-five thousand miles nearer the earth in perigee than in apogee.6 Morbid depression in its first onset often coincides with what Bevan-Lewis calls a decline of object-consciousness and an in- crease of consciousness of self. States of reverie or self-absorp- 1 Zur Psychologic der Siinde, der Bekehrung und des Glaubens; tr. by Ch. Schrempf, 1850.
*Fe"re": La Pathologie des Emotions. Paris, 1892, p. 352.
* Magnan: Psychiatrische Vorlesungen. Heft I. Especially Lecture VII.
4 For a concise characterization, see Kraepelin's Psychiatric, fourth edition, 5 Ludwig Kirn: Die periodischen Psychoses. Stuttgart, 1878. Especially p. 37 et seq.
6 Ueber die Gesetze des periodischen Irreseins und verwandter Zustande von Sanitats Rath. Dr. Koster, 1882. See also T. L. Bolton's Rhythms, Am. Jour. of Psy., January, 1894, vol. vi, pp. 145-238.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3r3 tion gain at the expense of interest in outer things. The mus- cular factor of thought diminishes and the mind fails to grasp and unite the factors of the environment. Volition is restricted, while both mental states and automatisms become segregated and, as it were, feralized from the control or domestication of attention and the ego. Attempts to explain things result in a new nexus of ideas, and be- cause the mental disaggregation makes problems seem simple and therefore their solutions easy, there is a new sense of freedom, and the old associative plexus is loosened as another self or a new per- sonality emerges which as a product of devitalization is on a lower level, because " a weakening of associative affinity arouses correlative centers."
This illustrates three laws of great significance and pertinence: (a) the power of conscience and especially of a sense of guilt, (&) the dissociative action of depression upon the psychic plexus which may prepare for a recombination of elements on a higher, as in mor- bid cases it more often does on a lower, plane, and (c) the deep tendency of our nature to react from pain to joy, which is the moment of conversion, and all the more intense by contrast and resilience. Here, again, especially in the abnormal oscillation, sex, if not a key, supplies suggestive analogy. Nothing save hunger alone is judged from such different standpoints by the same person, and reversal of view-point is nowhere so sudden and extreme in so brief a period of time. Noth- ing so upsets the poise and stability of the soul as excess, whether by natural or unnatural methods. From passionate love and desire that may reach an intensity that breaks through every restraint of interest in the well-being of self or of one most loved, of decency and law, the disequilibrated soul may pass in a brief interval to post-coital rage against its beloved, of sometimes homicidal intensity, or to the depths of self-abasement, despair, and perhaps suicide. It is sins in this field, as we just saw, that are so often found to be at the heart of melancholy where psychically induced by qualms of conscience, and when somatic causes are primary and the depressive delusions secondary, the latter are peculiarly prone to be of a sexual character. It is a change in the wider irradiation of this function, especially at adolescence and senescence, when its instability is greatest, that is so often felt to need an explanation, which makes the hypersensitized and abnormal soul in its illusions construe the universe as if it all centered about his own person. In the moment of temptation, all tense, eager, self-assertive and aggressive, resourceful and masterful in overcoming obstacles or meeting objections, ready to make any pledge or to violate any vow, to face any danger, to meet any enemy, and to overrule every scruple; and then a little later, abject, contrite, a prey to nameless fears, weak and irritable, perhaps with complete reversal of feeling, temporary paralysis of will and a dull stagnation of thought, and with a totally new scenery of images and associations as if a new personality had supervened. These are not exaggerations of what the exercise of a function normally healthful may and often 59 3H THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE does become not only in the enfeebled, degenerate, and corrupt, but, to some extent, in immature and callow natures as well, especially when wrongly set in external circumstances and methods, and in the false perspective of popular ignorance and misinformation. Here, then, we must seek one of the keys not only to asceticism and celibacy, much unhappy domestic life, and many of the secrets of divorce courts, but to many of the more highly saturated and otherwise inexplicable phenomena in religious life.
Gautama's long struggle with the problem of pain and evil in the world led him to a very different conclusion in the law of Karma. We have many lives behind us, as well as be- fore. We reap only what we have sowed in the lives that preceded the present. These have been such that no one can make himself perfect in a single life. Many are needed to work our way upward away from sin and sorrow. Therefore let us be kind and compassionate, even to animals, practise charity, temperance, eradicate evil and beautify our souls, turn if possible all affection into one great compassion for all that lives, and then we shall need no worship, prayer, priest- hood, or even personal God, but can at last, when renuncia- tion is complete, enter the great peace of which we know noth- ing, and find the only comfort possible in the hour of death in thinking on our good deeds.
The Christian solution, if we interpret it in terms of mod- ern psychology rather than in those of dogma, may be thus stated: Having tried to look the fact of our departure from nature and our ideal squarely in the face, and realized how far we are from what we would be, or might have been with other antecedents — itself a discipline of the highest ethico- psychic value — we shall all, even the best of us, find sooner or later that our imperfections of nature and nurture are too many and great to be overcome by any effort we can possibly make. Habits and instincts are too much for our will. The good we can do is partial, or lacks spontaneity; it is an arti- fact we have to force upon ourselves. Therefore, the only course is to stop special and multifarious striving and fall back on more generic and unconscious impulsion; with a changed heart and a new affection, having fallen in love with righteousness, surrender to this new love; make it supreme and complete; let it have free course, striving only to remove ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3J5 obstacles; feed its flame by pious exercise; fan it by every in- spiring example, especially by that of the great Exemplar; be this love's slave, its victim, follow its every behest; trust it blindly as the only pure and unfallen thing in us, feel its very season supremely holy, and fix it on the highest object; aspire even more than endeavor; emulate everything that in- spires us, for love is as old as life itself and stronger, and is therefore alone capable of reconstructing it from the bottom. It is thus the power that makes for righteousness in the soul. III. Intellectual reconstruction, or, in Herbartian phrase, working over ideas, is almost a synonym of mental growth. In childhood credulity amounts almost to hypnotic sugges- tibility. Not only is everything believed, but the faintest hint starts the exuberant imagination to vividness often hallu- cinatory. This power to believe the false and even the absurd, in infancy, is not defect, but excess of psychic vitality. The narrow horizon of reality within the juvenile ken is not enough, and the world of fancy and myth is needed to sup- plement it. Never is receptivity so near to creative energy, and this is why genius is defined as the preservation into ma- ture years of the fecund mental spontaneity of childhood.
John Fiske says: " I remember distinctly the conception which I had formed when five years of age. I imagined a narrow office just over the zenith, with a tall standing-desk running lengthwise, upon which lay several open ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof over this office, and the walls rose scarcely five feet from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk could look out upon the whole world. There were two persons at the desk, and one of them — a tall, slender man, of aquiline features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in his hand and another behind his ear — was God. The other, whose appearance I do not distinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were diligently watching the deeds of men and recording them in the ledgers. To my infant mind this picture was not grotesque, but in- effably solemn, and the fact that all my words and acts were thus written down, to confront me at the day of judgment, seemed naturally a matter of grave concern." 1 How very crude religious imagery of God, heaven, death, hell, angels, ghosts, witches, prayers, Church ceremonies, etc., is, is well illustrated in a valuable and suggestive though lThe Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge. Boston, 1886, p. Il6 316 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE confessedly local and incomplete study of this in California on a basis of 1091 compositions upon these subjects.1 God, e. g., may be imaged as a benign or cruel gray-bearded, blue giant; the devil as pictured on labels of deviled ham, or in a Punch and Judy show, etc. While these crass conceptions caused vague questionings sometimes as early as from four years to ten, the doubting spirit in this field culminated at thirteen or fourteen, when criticism seems more persistent than later, and Earl Barnes thinks that at this period special effort should be made to help the child to correct and adjust his most grotesque ideas. The first appearance of this spirit is often seen in the phrases: " I think," " have been told," " was taught," " they say," " I used to think," and in the use of " if," " but," and "perhaps." Barnes thinks that " from fifteen to eighteen there is no such persistent exercise of the critical judgment in matters theological as there is between twelve and fifteen," as if former perplexities had been temporarily laid aside. The more gross and material the imagination and per- haps the younger the child, when religious ideas are instilled and imagery formed, the more inadequate the latter becomes, and, therefore, the more drastic the conflict later. The conclusion of this paper is that " the period of most intense critical activity in theological directions seems to be that of puberty. Some special effort should be made at that time to rearranging and adjusting philosophical and theological conceptions." Doubts first appear as checks or inhibitions of the illusions of extra belief or Aberglaube. The overblown bubbles of fancy often break because they collide, and lose a given sum of arrest in the familiar way described by Taine. In our modern and especially in the American world, the spirit of questioning and even criticising where children should only sympathetically appreciate and admire comes all too soon. The rapid expan- sion of the mental horizon and the new powers of body and soul necessarily involve a change of standpoint and of belief. Hence there is skepticism, which etymologically means look- ing around, and doubt, which means hesitation between two theological Life of a California Child. Fed. Sem., December, 1893, vol. ii, p. 442. See also my Contents of Children's Minds. Fed. Sem., June, 1891, vol.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 31?
views or acts. This occurs at nearly all stages of life, but is far more radical and comprehensive throughout this period, which is its grand climacteric.
Rectifications concerning Santa Claus, fairy tales, clas- sical gods and myths, and popular superstitions are made naturally and almost unconsciously as the new desire for cer- tainty slowly arises. Children seek proof by touching, quot- ing, wagers, ordeals, ceremonial oaths, in ways which have been described with much detail by Mr. M. H. Small.1 Crude imagery is normally shed by vital processes, better described as exfoliation and desquamation than by psychologic or re- ligious terms, as growth substitutes larger and fitter ideas. The reasons why religious doubt is so hard and sometimes tragic are manifold; the bad pedagogy that insists on the literal historic truth of all Scripture itself, due to the low vitality of religious life, the way in which virtue is thought to depend on belief, which makes reconstruction morally dan- gerous, and the virus of orthodox theology, which makes no provision for growth, — all this is calamitous for youth. The gravest doubts of this kind are at first of certain miracles, the morality of some of the Old Testament heroes, and perhaps of Jehovah, or the goodness of God himself in permitting suf- fering and sending so many to hell, special answers to prayer, the Judgment Day, etc. Later come doubts of the Trinity and the deity of Jesus, his resurrection, supernatural birth, fore- ordination, and immortality. Where the clay of dogma is tamped down too hard about the roots of the growing soul either the latter is arrested or else doctrines are ruptured. Of all the outrages and mutilations practised upon youth by well- meaning adults, insistence on such dogmas upon pain of moral offense is perhaps the very most disastrous and antireligious in its results, for it enlists the conscience of the individual at the age when it is most vigorous and tender, against his own normal mental development.