On the other hand, as is far better understood, the change may come too late. Happily, it rarely harms, however post- mature its subjects, and may transform those grown old in sin whom nothing else can help, but its initiation is harder, its completeness rarer, and the obstacles to its every stage greater. It may have to rectify vocation, perhaps with suffer- ing to the family, break habits and associations grown in- ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 347 veterate, and involves going back to the branching of the ways before which youth normally lingers and ponders. Hence, the physical and mental strain is greater, and the mor- bidities are increased. The devil in each of us has had time to make his intrenchments within stronger, and has grown worldly wise and casuistical.
These tendencies to narrow the sweep of this great biotic law, to make it a psychic fetish, a neurosis, a ritual of initia- tion instead of a norm of life, till nothing more needs regen- eration than both the theory and administration of regenera- tion itself, have had many sad results. They often tend to cultivate a gushy, religious sentimentalism of a unique type that evirates character, favor flightiness, unctuousness, mobile and superficial sentiments, incline to ultra-femininity and pa- theticism, and to love* of climaxes that react to apathy. The cerebro-spinal and vaso-motor system is ensanguined in those of erethic diathesis by temperamental eloquence, and tempo- rary excitement takes precedence over impulsion to the nearest duties. Such incitements to virtue are like a cloudburst that only slightly irrigates faith or works which need its refresh- ment, but makes the soul resemble landscapes where droughts and washouts alternate and there is no storage system.
Feeling is basal and central in the new psychology of the soul, but this is not feeling in this sense, but only its froth and sillibub. Or, again, the healthful sense of imperfection, incompleteness, or in- adequacy predisposes to focus upon some specific act or trait, for the youthful intellect is very concrete. Single and often petty faults are " fetished " till they seem heinous. Youth feel baffled or dejected, and this suggests demerit or even penalty and fear, that may be acu- minated. Lack of robustness of health, or even fatigue, are almost always factors and often dominant. Anxiety, especially about their life work or the future generally, easily becomes morbid. Perhaps they take the reconstruction of their entire moral regimen into their hands and would be literally and absolutely perfect. This stage of legalism often appears in our data. They would do their full and complete duty. But there are many duties which conflict, and some must give way. Hence casuistry arises, and in their mental awkward- ness they are driven almost to desperation by problems with which their feeble powers can not cope, for a complete system of duties is postulated. Again, conscience is hypersensitized and every little act is good or bad, while there is no broad domain of ethically neutral acts such as the Stoics strove so painfully to elaborate. Either or, sic aut non, is the dilemma that suffices for all decisions. They become fin- 34** THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE icky, overnice, are paralyzed and can not decide at trivial emer- gencies. Rigid standards are set up for puerile details. This Coe well illustrates by, e. g., a girl who would say " Thank you " for every pin, every flower or bouquet; another who, having vowed to pray each day at ten, would drop her pencil or make some excuse to touch her knees to the floor every day at that time; a boy who, starting from the major premise that everything worth doing at all was worth doing well, would leave the reaper he was running in the field and go back to pick up every head of wheat behind; one who must pull every tiniest weed in the garden; children who copy and recopy a page many times if there is the least error, misplaced dot, comma, etc.; one who in a choir would stop singing if there was a sentiment in the hymn he was not sure he believed, etc. In this state of nerves and moral touchiness, youth often grow irritable and have bitter and long conflicts with their tempers. Fears of having committed the un- pardonable sin, in rare cases, become tragic. There is a veritable obsession of the duty of deciding by some inner witness or outer token whether they are really Christians, or what vocation to adopt, and they often feel that right impels them to do something they dis- like or are unfitted for. The moral imperative may provoke self- effacement in many forms. A flitting thought of a possible crime startles them with the dread that they might commit it. Thus the young, if made to feel a moral strain to which they can not adequately respond, often nag themselves into crankiness, which suggests the overscrupulosity so characteristic of some forms of adolescent de- generation, against which interesting occupations, objective life, intelligent sympathy by insightful adults, and physical hygiene, are the only prophylactics.
Sometimes this ethical perversion is directed to others. The lives of religious people are found wanting, friends are criticized, social forms and the artificialities of life are keenly felt and work their disenchantments. The neophyte would reform his social environment. His insights are true and his judgments correct, but he soon finds that he can no more reform the world than he can himself. His mental apercus are so far more developed than his will-power, that he feels baffled, rebuffed, heated by social frictions, thrown back on himself, whenever he tries to accomplish things. He is utterly unable to meet the new demands he makes or recognizes, is impatient to satisfy his ideals, can make no form of adjustment that is satis- factory, and every efferent impetus is balked. He knows and feels great things, but can do little or nothing. He feels the mighty im- pulses of the everlasting ought and is ready to essay heroic tasks, but can bring nothing to pass. He feels himself superior in penetra- tion but very inferior in execution. All that he really could accom- plish seems mean and homely.
Hence some form of renunciation is inevitable, for salvation is not by works. Thus the striver may relax and relapse to the old life of habit and the easiest way, and perhaps with a sense of wasted ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 349 effort because he has done his best and failed. He grows indifferent, perhaps cynical toward the good life, or possibly revolts and makes evil his good, and plunges into self-indulgence. There is often an intercalary stage of religious and ethical neutrality for months or years, during which the powers below consciousness are solving all his problems by their slow method of growth and all unbeknown to him, till, in the denouement, he is taken into partnership with his own under-soul and achieves the second part of the process of re- construction. Or, again, in the more classical type, at the point of defeat and bankruptcy of effort to be wholly good and do all duty, there is a sense of surrender to some deeper powers felt to exist in the soul. There is recognition of older, surer, more potent agencies than those which conscious effort can command. The whole case is non- suited in the lower court and appeal taken to a higher and better one. A new dynamism arises from the depths of the soul which takes the place of conscious striving and seems like a new will or god working in us. The young convert feels estranged to both himself and others, because he is different from what he had so long been before. Hence he is prone to deem himself peculiar and not like others, because unlike his former self. He readily regards his mutation as super- natural or miraculous, because it is too large for his mind to interpret. There is a changed center of apperception. All these are normal growth formulae, and all failures to achieve true conversion are forms of mental, moral, or emotional arrest or perversion, while every good motive or example of this age of life is an incentive to it. Thus in religious thought, we must reverse current processes and argue from fact to theory; from below upward; pass from man to God; look to the heart to explain creeds and not the reverse, for all religions are formed to minister to human needs. Our quest should be from what psychic facts did faiths arise. Religion is of the emotion and instincts and not primarily of the mind. Buddhism is great and the teachings of Jesus divine because each codified and organized a higher stage of human growth. If proof is needed the soul of belief is gone. Sacred truth is that which rings true to the heart, and many of the most reli- gious people and the greatest doers are foolish at reasons. Creeds are but crude interpretations of wordless music, and the soul responds to the great religions as a violin rightly tuned responds by sympathetic vibration to an orchestra. The thing is to awaken an echo. Faith tells the secrets of the world in an unknown tongue, and Fielding Hall argues that it dies out with natural and racial fecundity.
In some of our cases this psychic growth seems to be purely spontaneous. On a walk, at a lesson, there is a sudden sense of a new, larger, and purer life, and this may be re- garded as the decisive moment. New aspiration which may even impel ejaculatory prayer, new insights, ideals, waves cf love, resolves to do duty and attain perfection, and noble 35° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ambitions, break out and may take possession of life. Or in a quiet hour comes a sense of moral discontent with self, or with companions, as if conscience sprung into function, or a sense of increased reality of the world or of greater serious- ness of life, a strange feeling of dependence upon some higher power, a passion for service. Or old truths open up new meanings, perhaps there are thrills or waves of joy or peace, reveries and even dreams grow intense almost to visions, phrases are automatically formulated, perhaps spoken, or, in some cases, heard. Again, manifold depressions arise no less spontaneously. Overblown personal vanity is suddenly con- fronted by a feeling of inability to do anything worth while and fears to disappoint all friendly expectation, while youth agonize to find some latent talent in themselves. They feel themselves dishonest, impure, slothful, guilty, or revengeful. Again the world recedes, seems afar, unreal, indifferent, and mechanical, so that all interest dies or all is a baffling mystery. God suddenly seems gone, or is bad because he made hell. Is there any truth or standard, or can I attain it? is a question that often marks the moment when, turning from the childish preoccupation with particular objects, the adolescent passion for the general and universal arises and a love of logic and self-analysis and an abhorrence of compromise come to the surface. All this is, as Lipsius has well said, essentially " a natural process of a higher order." It is growth, which has its own dynamics which always defies ordinary logic, but which here seems all the more mysterious because it is into a higher nature, somewhat alien to all that had preceded. It tends to no disorders of conscience or of life.
In an atmosphere charged with religiosity each of these may be interpreted by the individual as the beginning or as the substance of conversion and described in its technical phrases. Among Coe's and other cases, one dreamed of taking an examination in his fitness to go to heaven; one had a vision of a broad and narrow way, saw a light out of a tomb, had a sense of presence, of some one dictating thoughts, heard an inner voice, saw a luminous eye in the ceiling, had a sense of being under two influences, one good and one bad, but both objective; one experienced an outburst of defiance to God, shak- ing the fist at the sky and telling him how unjust and hated he was. The heart is often now too much for the intellect suggesting neurot- icism, and feeble minds often develop casuistry, magnifying innocent ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 35 l things to sins of deepest dye, or a finicky susceptibility " showing the undue dominance of a major premise." When the brotherhood of man dawns, young men in their warm beds are tortured into sleep- lessness by the thought that some of their fellow men are cold.1 A girl of twelve, on a visit, thought it sinful not to tell her hostess if she had taken a pin. Another could not decide on fine points of ex- pression in a composition and worked herself almost into a frenzy. Another argued with herself on all small matters, and only learned to make prompt decisions when they were necessary by riding a bicycle. A young girl, impressed by a neighbor's suicide, was overwhelmed with the fear lest she should kill her mother, which she quelled by telling her of it. Another had fear of every post, avoided tracks, and suffered a long hydrophobia.
VI. What contrast can be greater than when we turn from these grimaces and tweaks of religiosity, to regard con- version as the philosophy of history and religion and the germ of all educational systems? I have collected and have before me forty-two definitions of religion. They are as varied as the descriptions of religious experience. For some authorities it is essentially noetic; for others it is in the realm of feeling or volition; for others it is chiefly moral. All are instructive, or at least suggestive, but they, too, are so very diverse and sometimes so contradictory as to be but broken lights, per- haps because they also largely rest, as religion is peculiarly prone to do, upon individual differences of character and life. If so, they are valuable only as bases of classification, or as data and material toward a real definition. Pending this. I suggest that religion may be described from the view-point of psychology as favoring the old and now often discarded etymology of the word religion, as rebinding, bringing back, or as restoration. As natural, it is reestablished unity with nature; as ethical, a reunion of conduct with conscience; as theoretical, it is a re-at-one-ment of the mind with truth; as feeling, it is the ecstatic closing in again of the highest love with its supreme object, or fresh impulse along a for- saken but recovered path. The common element is atone- ment with implication of previous estrangement or heteri- zation, the ecstatic closing in by faith or intuition w?th what is felt to be normative and central. The heart finds ob- 35 2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE jects, the will duties, and the intellect truths to adequately and truly express them, but all after more or less jeopardy or loss. The reunion must be in the field of the higher nature, and must generally be achieved with effort and anxiety. How man came to deviate from his ideal, or the cause and extent of his departure from it; the form under which the ideal is conceived, whether subjectively or objectively; how the rapprochement is begun; whether the process is transcendent or immanent, objective or subjective — important as they are for cult, theory, conduct, sentiment — are less central. Re- ligion is the reinstallation of the individual or the race into its true place in the world, recovery to health or wholeness. Always and everywhere the fall-motif is present, however far in the background, and joy is always felt at the reascent.
The very idea of catholicity, Bible, and even religion itself, means consensus, and assumes the same fundamental needs, instincts, and experiences for all. Always there was a primitive state of unity, harmony, joy, innocence; then a tension, a sense of error, loss, estrangement or guilt, decay, fear; then something once more or less integral or dear is dropped, sacrificed, alienated, hated; thence results new life, joy, love, and restoration; and lastly, there is growth along new lines. These are cardinal, and each stage has countless interpretations. The primitive state may be materially con- ceived as one of nature, idyllic innocence, or instinct, and vari- ously located in time and place, or as a psychic condition. Its loss has been slight or total, ascribed to many internal, exter- nal, and even transcendental causes, thought to be objective and historic, or subjective and ideal, as deviation from a norm or disobedience of the commands of an outraged Deity. The sense of insufficiency may deepen to demerit and ill-desert, reaching even a passion for punishment, not merely for pur- gation but also for retribution, that justice may be done; or a hunger may arise, no less intense, for the disclosure of a better way and strength to walk in it. The third stage has been described as losing a burden; the surrender of a per- verse will; the mortification of the body, or even the loss of an offending member; the sacrifice of possession, career, friends, or poverty, chastity, and obedience; the abandonment of culture and knowledge, or the limitation of science; the an- ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 353 nihilation of will and desire; the reversal of former loves, and ambition, or the substitution of a passionate passivity in their place, as the molt of the old self had to be more or less deep or complete. The fourth stage begins with a sense of salvage of something precious from the wreck. Despite all the loss, there is a reservoir of life abounding that yet wells up from its deep springs, which may be formulated as a biological gift of nature or as by divine grace, with an hedonic sweet- ness at the root that may make us jubilant in chains, disease, pain, calamity, or even death. It is this euphoria of the soul's life that transcends every gratification of sense, possession, ambition, etc., as far as the life of the race upon which the soul enters transcends that of the individual. Lastly, the sense of growth and progress to ever new and higher planes, which has made every conception of evolution so fascinating, is es- sential to the vitality of interest, curiosity, love, achievement, and of all our powers. All these are phases of the great change of base from the egoism, normal and necessary to the first stage of human life, to the self-subordination of the stage of philoprogenitive maturity which is ripening to die for what it lives for, where love has done its perfect work and self has " passed to music out of sight," and where the Platonic eros, Pauline charity, Buddhistic sympathy and pity, or Jesus's en- thusiasm for humanity, that loves the Lord and neighbors with all mind, might, and strength, have taken its place. What more has life to give or its wisdom to teach?
There is a sense in which the story of primitive man, from the troglodytes up, is a long passion history. For the most part, what we call the prehistoric period is so because it is as unhistorical as the story of kites and hawks. The struggle for survival, beginning with the stern law in the animal world, Eat or be eaten, shows that man has been a wolf to his fellow man. The infant comes crying into the world with the pain-field at first larger than the pleasure-field. The rem- nant that survives is small; the ape and the tiger in man's nature have died hard, or too often still survive. The best of us carry a heavy handicap of biological sin from our ancestors. Tragic guilt in classic drama, like the curse of Atreus's house, a theme now revived in drama by Ibsen, Hoffman, and others, exhibits the physiological effects of the errors or vices of the 354 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE past. Lucretius pities the estate of man craven by fear and his soul darkened by srperstition. Theology lately taught that depravity may be total, and that, for most, the sufferings of this world culminate in transcendental torture hereafter. At best, life is short; man is preyed upon by hundreds of diseases officially catalogued; death is sure and often comes as a relief. The inevitable hour, to many world-sick souls, makes every tick of the clock pathetic and the very lapse of time itself pitiful. The high aspirations and ambitions of adoles- cence shrivel as life advances, and because many of its prom- ises are unfulfilled, philosophers have urged that unless there be immortality our nature is a lie. Modern industry does not fit the hygienic needs of the body, nor mental work satisfy those of the soul. Monsters of cruelty and rapacity have been let loose as scourges of mankind and enemies of the hu- man race, and thus melancholy has abundant food to batten on. Many now urge that our race is decadent and degenerate, and even impeach modern civilization. The wise men suffer from an ignorance that is unfathomable, and to breaking hearts it has almost seemed as if man were but a parasite upon this clod of earth, whom the gods, if there be any, could not see with a microscope even if they wished to. Thus even joy and beauty are pathic and have a trace of woe in them, or even should not have been, because they torture man with a sense of what is so much better than he can possibly attain. So fallen is man, growing ever farther from heaven as he leaves childhood be- hind, that some, like Tithonus, would almost pray the gods to take back their gift of immortality. World-woe may re- gard creation itself as a blunder or a crime, and regret and remorse not only rob man of all hope and self-respect, but make autumn and even twilight ominously bodeful of his darkening doom. If man be not an utterly lost and fallen creature, he is at least wretched and an object of pity to himself.
Now man's self-pity and sense of his own loss and imper- fection are reflected, projected, ejected, or objectified in the transcendental realm as ill-will, anger, or even among the Greeks as jealousy of the gods, in fear of whom most have grov- eled, and against whom only a few Titanic souls have rebelled. But as human conditions slowly ameliorated and man asserted ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 355 his dominion over beasts and over nature, we find, besides enmity, traces of pity in the gods and demigods whom he reveres. Buddha was smitten with the anguish of pathos at the thought of death, evil, and finitude, so that, abandoning all that makes life attractive for most, he sought to find a way out to peace. The labors of Hercules, Theseus, and Prometheus were merciful and sympathetic acts. Jove can remit his thunder and Jehovah grow slow to anger and com- passionate upon the intercession of his favorites. Thor, Siegfried, and even Beowulf, and many a culture hero, have waged war against the enemies of man, and deep in the popu- lar consciousness is the idea that the great souls, the saviors of the race from evil, who have died, may some time return to right things; reward those that have suffered unjustly, or become intercessors with higher powers. Indeed, all great men and heroes have a soteriological function in the world. Wherever leaders appear, their followers are more or less pro- tected and sheltered in their shadow. Those who advance the kingdom of man by intellectual achievement, discovery, in- vention, teaching how to think the world more truly and economically; light-bearers who become the hermits and per- haps the martyrs of truth; reformers, legislators, founders of