religions, who reconstruct society on higher levels; the great editors and re-editors of the sacred traditions of the race into deathless classic form; all who live out the inner life of con- viction; who are called, sent, or commissioned by the evolu- tionary push upward, which is the oracle of the soul — all these are immortal in the sense that their work is deathless; and when we reflect on what each century would have been with- out a few, or, at best, a few dozen leaders, we may well call them the caryatides in the temple of humanity, the true aristarchy, and, in a way, the saviors of man, because express- ing more fully his inner vocation. Many if not most of these have loved their task better than life, have helped save men from despair by widening the dominion of man and enrich- ing his life; have been comforters, and all who live in their companionship, though it be across the centuries, are branches of a true vine. Into their hands the destinies of the world have been largely committed, and its history is to a great extent that of their own thoughts and achievements. It would THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE be a bold task, far more so than to designate the hundred or thousand best books, to name these leaders, as Comte attempts in his worship of humanity. But while these men are the best possessions of the world, it will never worship them. While these names are revered as the strong are instinctively vener- ated by the weak, and while the lives of many of them are pathetic enough, service to the race has not always been the all-dominating motive, and heroes scorn to either give or take pity. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, they would so resent it that to be pitied even by the gods would be matter for revenge, because a being who could pity would lack due respect for the object of his pity, and the latter would regard it as an insult. Only the weak crave it. Beggars show their sores and tell their stories, often more characteristic than their names or photographs. Weak women invent and group symptoms to excite the interest of doctors from an uncon- scious craving that accepts pity as a pinchbeck substitute for love. There is a real inebriation of pity, too, that makes it infectious. It seemed to the Stoic sage a disease, and Aristotle thought that, like fear, it needed purgation in the drama and otherwise, lest it grow too strong and overmaster the serenity and dignity of the philosophical mind. Spinoza thought it unworthy, because it was passive, and the modern world knows that it may take the form of a selfish inebriation that finds no vent in efforts to relieve the suffering that causes it. The very bodily manifestations, or, according to some theories, the somatic causes of it, are unworthy; hence, the hero is content to feel that no evil can befall a good man living or dead, and is satisfied to have attained salvation of his own kind in his own way; he rarely feels the pedagogical motive of helping others, and perhaps confirms his own pride with some evolutionary conception that the lowly, feeble, and weak are doomed to extinction to make room for the elect strong. This, especially in our overindividualized age, with egotism full-blown, is one factor in explaining why some who have served the world best have neither loved mankind nor been loved.
One characteristic of religious genius, however, has always been its wide and deep human sympathy with man in all stations. In them, love, which is perhaps most closely asso- ciated with the care of the young, and has its best exempli- ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 357 ncation in maternal sacrifice and in the purest love of sex, has broadened to the phratry, deme, curia, gens, tribe, and clan, and to the poor, sick, and defective; it has developed the function of helper, and in its culmination has passed even be- yond national patriotism to philanthropy, and, perhaps, even includes animals, and indeed all being. This " pathos of resonance " a recent writer (Lyon) would make the charac- teristic of genius, which is in a state of exquisitely sensitized rapport with the entire human environment and feels keenly all its joy and woe. This culmination is the result of long development, because pity tends to be almost inversely as the square of the psychic distance from its object. The young can not pity because they lack experience with pain; the rich can not sympathize with the poor because they have not known poverty; and the poof have no feeling for the suffering of the rich. Hence, the middle station in life is most favorable for the wholesome exercise of this sentiment. Again, we see this illustrated in the crude school penalties that have been devised to correct it. The child who laughs at the lame has his own leg tied, or if he scorns the hungry is himself made to fast. Criminals of the pitiless type who torture and gloat over suffering that should cause them to grieve, are arrested at this stage and are callous to dolorific. sensations. So the blind, be- cause they can not see the expressions of pain, or the deaf, because they can not hear them, often seem cruel. But true sympathy, as Sutherland has shown, is as basal for morals as Jesus made love the basal for true religion. The very essence of youth consists in making this transit completely in all the departments of its nature and effectively insuring itself against relapse to either miserablism or sin. Every life is stunted that has not experienced this metamorphosis in some form. If the Church allows it to fossilize, psychology, when it be- comes truly biological, will preach it. Indeed, the chief fact of genetic psychology is conversion, a real and momentous change of unsurpassed scientific and practical importance and interest. It is one of the best criteria of the degree of culture of different ages, races, religions, and communities, how it is conceived, interpreted, formulated, and administered. It is the inner meaning of the savage initiations described in the last chapter, and from Paul's change of belief and Augustine's 358 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE change of life and creed down to Scherer, from the most formal and external confirmation down to the most convulsive colored Methodistic inner revolution, from the slowest anti- crisis theories of growth to the most cataleptic instantaneous reversal of life, the change has, at its core, an unchanged and constant element beneath all its mutable fashions in different ages, races, and sects, viz., growth from a life of self to one of service. That it is so often administered by those who have no conception of its vaster significance, or who lack all higher sanctity, and indeed that it is so often effective when con- ceived as a mere formal fetish or a windy mouthful of the most hackneyed and time-worn phrases, shows a vitality such as no other human culture-form has ever possessed. Even the most partial, degenerate, and aberrant forms of it, while they suggest that nothing so needs regeneration in all its ways, means, and conceptions as regeneration, still have incompa- rable efficiency when all else fails. If it often most needs to be saved from its friends, it still more needs to be psycho- logically restated and vindicated to both religious, scientific, and pedagogic minds that have undervalued or even ignored and scoffed at it.
Rightly understood, the historic period begins with the dawning adolescence of the race, the gospel of its infancy be- ing always and everywhere more or less mythic. If we could organize the strategraphic stages of the development of con- sciousness for all the historic record, somewhat as geologists have organized their science; if we could correctly describe the emergence of conscious mind from the primeval sea of in- stinct and impulse; reconstruct the so evanescent " soft parts " and determine all the genera and species of all the paleo- psychic types from their fossils of implements, inscriptions, etymologies, myths and rites, degenerate, neurotic reflexes, excavated stonework, ancient manuscripts, etc.; eliminate the effects of all retrogression periods, of erosion, iconoclasm, the fall of the Roman Empire, all dark and stationary ages, as well as the submergence effects of unrecorded generations; account for gaps, flows, convulsions, inversion; point to the best outcrop for every stage of mental evolution down through all the ethnographic meso- and ceno-psychic strata; and thus see some realization of the rude but magnificent ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 359 dream dimly and very diversely described by Hobbes as the Leviathan, by Comte as la grand Eire, by Hegel as the phe- nomenology of mind, by Hartmann as that of morals, by Lilienfeldt and Schafer as the social man, of which each individual is a cell and each institution an organ, etc.. the genetic psychology of such a cosmic homo-sapiens would be a perfect, normal, and uninterrupted history of the human soul. His association processes would work by no such rudi- mentary laws as contiguity in time and space, but would co- ordinate from every race and land every typical expression by word or deed of every tendency, element, and stage. If we could mark everything upon a common scale as Romanes would correlate animals, infancy, and savagery, we should then have a standard to measure and also to compare progress in different civilizations; all categories would reveal their stages in true relations of superposition, each, as in an ideal geologic section, marked by its characteristic types, while the diverse experiences of man would not seem lacking in unity or too complex to have any character, as if its currents flowed in all directions and any culmination were possible, but life would be a consistent, continuous, complete, and self-supporting whole. For such a being, a citizen of all times and climes, the doer of all deeds and the thinker of all thoughts, the logi- cal and the psychogenetic order could never disagree, if, in- deed, they were not absolutely and always identical. The philosophy of history, education, and life would be their aspect viewed from the standpoint of such a perfect, quasi theanthropic consciousness, and man's curriculum would be a complete organism or a science of all sciences, while his phi- losophy would not be an eclectic mosaic of glimpses, like a dis- sected map badly recomposed, but the true organic unity long sought but still delayed. This is the ideal and goal of the psy- chogenetic movement, which cross-sections previous modes of studying the human soul. The achievements of geology and of all the cosmogenetic sciences have not, perhaps, altogether required the labor yet needed to accomplish this work, but the currents of endeavor already setting in this direction, and the actual progress now being made, have given birth to a new hope in the world already big with promise. This would be perpetual growth so rapid and manifold that, by 36° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE contrast with the slow and often broken average progress of the race, any section of it would seem a period of spring-tide and youth, of reformation and Sabbath.
Our Bible comes nearer fulfilling this ideal than any other literature. Despite its deviations, redundancies, and gaps, when measured on such a program, it depicts the development of " Man-soul " in a way which, if it is rightly understood, leaves the best classics of the best races far behind. The Old Testament begins with the myth of cosmic origins and passes to the agricultural and pastoral stage of Cain and Abel, the heroics of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses and Joshua, the royalty of Saul, David, and Solomon, the legal stage of law and justice which so appeals to boys, to dawning prophecy, etc. It is all objective, strenuous, full of incident, battles, dramatic incidents, and with a large repertory of persons. There is fear, anger, jealousy, hate, but not love, and it de- picts an age of discipline and authority. Later comes the adolescent New Testament stage with its altruistic motives, and, last, the philosophic age of Pauline and other doctrines which appeal to the intellect. All this is normal and in pedagogic sequence, the order of which should not be reversed as is so often done in religious teaching. So, too, Jesus should be taught first as a kind, noble, but natural man, for the at- tribute of divinity makes him uncanny and sometimes monstrous to the child. But later the supernatural side of his being is necessary to fit the age when the heart and intuition so far outstrip the callow intellect.1 This can profitably be supplemented at certain points by some of the best material from other great ethnic religions. The passionate affirmation of monotheism in Mohammedan- ism not only illustrates how passionate may be the belief in one God, but it marks perhaps the next step above fetishism and idolatry, against which the early history of Israel was a long struggle. To pass from this lower paganism to the idea of one supreme ruler of heaven and earth is a revolutionary conversion for, e. g., African tribes, where Islam missions are now making such rapid advances, as well as teaching temper- 1 This is all elaborated with reasons in my article, Some Fundamental Principles of Sunday-School and Bible Teaching. Ped. Sem., December, 1901.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 36j ance, as Christianity does not. Confucianism with its reverence of age and worship of ancestors, its non-metaphys- ical, practical religion of duties and forms of daily life, its legalism and social conventionality, may fit the stage of boy- life and supplement the rules of Jewish legislation. At the top of the curve of life comes Christianity, forever supreme because it is the norm for the apical stage of human develop- ment, glorifying adolescence and glorified by it, and calcu- lated to retain and conserve youth before the decline of the highest powers of the soul in maturity and age. Buddhism, with its doctrine of universal sympathy, renunciation, peace, poise, and repose, has special messages to mature men and women. The religion of the Brahmanic Vedanta is, as Max Muller shows, the form of piety in old age and may supple- ment or at least tone the teachings of Paul and dogmatic theology, for, inconsistent as the two are in theory, both appeal to the nature of a Ciceronian old age.1 From all this I draw one more inference. Jesus sought to fulfil and not to destroy, and so Christianity evolved from Judaism as another and higher dispensation of the same con- tent. In Hegelian phrase, a decadent faith was sublated in a new ascendent one. Renan has shown how persistent in Christendom has been the idea of a third and yet higher rev- elation related to ours as it is to the Hebrew canon. This achievement of Jesus will be not a less but a more sublime pedagogic masterpiece if it is regarded not only as in itself the most precious work of the spirit but as a pattern and in- centive for us to do for other great but decaying religions what he did for Judaism, and if missionaries strive to fulfil rather than to destroy them. In some respects they are as susceptible of being a propaedeutic of Christianity as Jesus made the Old Testament to be. They, too, are full of symbols, types, and prophecies, and if treated by the method of sympathy rather than that of criticism could blossom into new life and be re- generated in our faith, to which they point as directly and which they need for completion as much as did the religion of 1 This is elaborated in an original and suggestive book, now in press, by a student of mine, Dr. Jean Du Buy. Some, but not all, of these principles are worked out in thesis by my pupil, S. B. Haslett. The Pedagogical Bible School, New York, 62 362 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Moses and David. The supreme mission problem to-day is the same for them as that which Jesus faced in Judea. They are degenerate and need an analogous new proclamation of what they ignorantly worship. The true problem is evolu- tion, not revolution, grafting and not uprooting, a revival of the best in them in this best age and not a fanatical running amuck. The missionary should proclaim that Confucius was a great sage; that Mohammed was a servant, in his way and day, of the true God; that the Buddha was a religious genius who opened up a new way of peace and* blessedness. Thus making sure that he is not ignorant of all the truth which every faith contains, cordially and enthusiastically apprecia- tive of all that is good, feeling all the devotion its worship and sacred writings can inspire, as Jesus first exploited the old cult, he will, if he is his true disciple, in his teaching seek to advance to the next step and open a new gospel till old dead stalks put forth green shoots, bloom, and bear fruit.
Finally, when this is attempted, as it is certain to be be- cause it is the only true and right way, these new growths will not always conform to Christianity as it is now under- stood, but there will be new features in these indigenous new evangels. That of the crude fetishistic races may be more like a purified Mohammedanism, and the latter may ripen into something like the ethical fidelity to duty of Confucianism. This, in turn, may sometimes prove to be as good a prepa- ration for our faith as Hebraism. The prematurely developed philosophic creeds of India may need to be rescued from their too early senescence and given a youth they never had. If this be done with fidelity to these and all other systems, the product will be something of priceless value in rejuvenating old races and will seem at first new and strange to us, while we in our turn may be converted to an enlarged and enriched conception of our own faith as parts of which they will take their place, as surely as it is adequate to the culminating golden stage of life, and our pistis will also have a gnosis that will meet the needs of academic youth to whom neither ex- isting religious institutions nor our college philosophy now adequately minister.
CHAPTER XV SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS I. Self-consciousness, vanity, affectation, and showing off — Dress, manners — Feats, bragging. II. Anger, pugnacity, repressals. III. Fear, shock, blushing, bash- fulness, modesty. IV. Pity, sympathy — Reluctance to dissent — Susceptibility. V. Love of home -versus running away — Truancy, wanderers — Relations to temperature and food — Animal and human migrations, nostalgia. VI. School and teachers versus home and parents — Imitation — Like and dislike of teach- ers. VII. Wider irradiations to adult ideals and plans for life — Ideals of vocation — Influence of historic and biblical characters — Home and foreign ideals. VIII. Property and the money sense. IX. Social judgment, cronies, and solitude — Ideas of punishment — Work together and alone. X. First forms of spontaneous social organizations — Gangs — Predatory clubs. XI. Student life and organizations — Banality, infantilism. Class feeling, hazing — Secret societies — German student clubs — Secrecy, initiations, and the duel — Town versus gown — Ideal relation of student and teacher — Caricature. XII. Associations for youth devised or guided by adults, (a) Captains of Tens — (3) Agassiz Association — (c) Abstinence Clubs — (d) Princely Knights — (e) Bands of Mercy — (f) Coming Men of America — (g) Harry Wadsworth Club — (h) Young Men's Christian Association — (/') Christian Endeavor; the evils of its oath — (/) Epworth League — (k) Brotherhood of St. Andrew — (/) Luther League — Conclusions. XIII. Material for moral and social cul- ture in: A, Oratory—^, Drama— C, The Arthuriad— £>, The Bible— E, His- tory— A new standard of moral values.
IN the last four chapters we have tried to describe the great awakening of love of the other sex and of nature, and the religious impressionability during adolescence, and to sug- gest the proper treatment of these three feeling-instincts. None of these undergo more characteristic developments than does the social nature to the description and regimen of which we now proceed. No creature is so gregarious as man, and we can hardly conceive him except as a member of the family and emerging, as the boy and girl now do, to become a socius in tribe, society, or political and industrial communities. As we have seen, individual differences of all kinds are now suddenly augmented. The interval between the strong and weak, the dull and bright, beautiful and ugly, becomes far greater than it was before. This of itself impresses upon each that he has 364 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE some rank in a scale, with some above and others below, and he is very eager to know his place here. There is a new sense of passing some kind of unwritten examination in the world's school and a new rivalry to stand high and not low upon some of these multiplying and lengthening scales. Each sex, too, now feels itself rated by the other, and the approval of a larger and more adult environment is also sought. The result is a greatly intensified social self-consciousness which may be ex- pressed in bashfulness, showing off, or affectation, according to temperament, environment, etc. To win good-will and avoid ill-will is now one of the strongest motives. Fame, glory, renown, leadership, may now become ruling passions. Praise is never so inebriating, and flattery is never so liable to cause conceit and a dualized hypocritical life, while censure, derision, or failures that suggest inferiority are never so depressive or so liable to leave a permanent mark. Poise between indiffer- ence to the good opinion of others and excessive regard for it is never so hard as in this most plastic stage of both tempera- ment and character.
I. Self -consciousness, vanity, affectation, and showing off. One of the first and most serious of these new self-ratals in girls concerns the gifts of heredity.1 They become conscious of, ponder, and often discuss their eyes in color, size, expression, movement; their hair, its abundance, its hue, color, etc.; their complexion, teeth, form, dimples; and study to show or con- ceal in most effective ways the good or bad that comes of breeding, blood, and family. They earliest in life and much more so than boys are conscious of their ancestors, parents, relatives, etc., and this normally, because their bodies and souls are in some sense better organs of heredity than man's.
Dress is always modified in a way that is sometimes very obvious up the grades in school. The boy suddenly realizes that his shoes are not blacked, or his coat is worn and dirty, his hair unbrushed, his collar, necktie, or cap not of the latest pattern, while girls love to flaunt new fashions and color com- 1 See my study with T. L. Smith: Showing Off and Bashfulness as Phases of Self-Consciousness. Fed. Sem., June, 1903, vol. x, pp. I59-I99- Also J. J. Hoppe: Die Eitelkeit und ihre Arten. Wurzburg, 1890, p. 38.
SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 365 binations and have a new sense for the toilet. The clothes- consciousness sometimes becomes a matter of very exiguous fastidiousness, and those who never cared how they looked before become now very conscious of their attire. While dress has a psychology of its own, it is its ornamental, decorative function, however, which chiefly concerns us here. Very challenging is the homology between the dress, which nature provides for animals by an organic function, and that which man, by the psychic function, which Schleiermacher was so fond of paralleling with the organic, provides for himself. Loudness and dandyism ill-adjusted to wealth, station, or to good taste are frequent. The influence of dress upon be- havior is now given a place in ethical text-books. That not merely the quality of goods and their cut but their rigidity or softness has much influence upon conduct, spirits, and even circulation, respiration, and digestion, is plain, and the maxim often advocated of so dressing wherever one is as to be utterly unconscious of dress is probably unpedagogical even more than it is at this age impossible to carry out. New styles of dress, toilet, or coiffure fads, perfumes, ribbons, curls, souvenir pins, rings, bows, motto-badges, new colors, charms, flowers, etc., quickly permeate a school community, as Small has described, in the age of greatest plasticity to fashion.1