Manners are, of course, minor morals and should be from within outward, and not products of external environment. They belong intrinsically to character and are normally the physiological economies of expressing the higher and better sentiments. Here girls are more plastic than boys, more apt in putting on and off vivacity, languishing moods, drawling speech, fine ladyism, superior ways, accents, and airs of many kinds; their penmanship, pronunciation, choice of words and style are all subject to affectation; they are precise, easy, in- dolent, mincing, boisterous, and readily fall into acting roles. Both boys and girls often imitate even half-unconsciously squints, position of lips, dialects, limps, coughing, stammering, and other speech defects, and even choreic symptoms, especially of favorite companions and teachers, or by way of mimicry 1 The Suggestibility of Children. Fed. Sem., December, 1896, vol. iv, pp.
366 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of those disliked, sometimes almost to the point of impersona- tion, to say nothing of every trade and occupation. Various styles are often successively aped until one is found or made by eclectic comparison that fits. Swagger ways, saccharinity, mincing, affability, hauteur, domineering loftiness, stoic im- perturbability, and perhaps hardness, callous apathy and indifference, languor, poses for effect, affected smiles and laughs thought to be fetching, every type of gait, poise and carriage, lisps, staccato or presto styles of speaking, extremes of primness and formality, and of abandon, everything by turn and nothing long — these show this to be a polymorphic stage of etiquette, bearing, and the style that does so much to make the man, and perhaps still more the woman.
In feats, stunts, and " dares," boys lead and are most per- sistent in seeking recognition. The cruder excellences of strength and fleetness, biceps, athletic record, and physical achievements become centers of intense social and self-con- sciousness. True to man's pedigree, because in primitive society the strongest was chief, they seek both distinction and victory. Aristotle long ago pointed out that true courage was the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, and in early youth we see both extremes before the mean is approximated. If the former could be made as much a matter of reproach as the latter, it would be well. The instinct of courage wrongly directed by " dares," impulsions suddenly appealed to by sug- gestion, and the list of risks and calamities in boy-life due to crude and ignorant challenges of courage, show that fool- hardiness, if often an insanity or form of mental arrest and defect, is, however, susceptible of easy early remedy, caution being the normal form of maturity. Thus, too, the presence and new consciousness of the other sex and of adults greatly intensifies as well as refines. Skills and accomplishments of a higher nature have new social motivation.
The bragging, boastful lie is a psychosis by itself which has of late been somewhat treated in the literature of psy- chology. Here the truth is left behind and the imagination Munchausenizes in the field of romance, heroics, and rodomon- tade. Ruse and deception are only the fore-school to this form of self-inflation. One of the most interesting groups of slang words has for its function the puncturing of these bubbles of SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 367 fake achievements and experiences for which childhood and youth have a keen sense and subject to summary treatment. Sometimes this is connected with impudence, often a form of showing off, but which is normally reduced in the teens. Where it is persistent, aggressive, and defiant it is frequently motivated by a stinging sense of inferiority, which at this age may incline to malevolence. The philosophic and the scientific man has a deep and basal desire to bring seeming and being into complete coincidence, at least in most of the realms of life. He would scorn to be admired for excellences which he does not possess, but demands recognition for real virtues. Perhaps, as a recent writer concludes,1 falsehood tends to develop in pro- portion as society becomes complex, and its evil is that it dwarfs the generous, esthetic, and social sentiments, and leads to profound dissociation.
This instinct of self-exhibition to win commendation which now becomes so dominant plays, of course, an enormous role at all ages and at all stages of life. Courting and combat also belong here. Insects and still more birds compete; they are dressed by nature in more bril- liant hues, and take a new interest in displaying every charm of color or form. Male wasps, butterflies, moths, fishes, frogs, and snakes abundantly illustrate all this. Birds acquire and show off new charms at the beginning of the breeding season. Primitive man is tattooed, removes hair or teeth, undergoes mutilations, wears ornaments, etc., under the stress of the same instinct.2 There are men and women whose manner, bearing, voice and whole nature undergo immediate and sudden transformation in the presence of the other sex. Each should thus be inspired both to be, do, think, and feel his or her best, and thus each both supplements and complements, and helps to make the other.
II. Anger undergoes characteristic changes in the teens, and its expressions, before more alike in boys and girls, show marked sexual differentiations. In boys the fighting instinct, if unchecked, is more intense and has new motives. The human being is no exception to the law of the animal world in this respect.
1 Le Mensonge: G. L. Duprat. Paris, 1903, p. 183. Also Nordau, Conven- tionelle Liigen, 1898.
2 See Scott: Sex and Art. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1896, vol. vii, pp.
368 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Pugnacity is, in good part at least, a secondary sexual trait, arising near maturity and chiefly in the male. Some male grasshoppers fight so that, Darwin tells us, in China they are matched like young cocks. Ants fight and are often found dead with mandibles locked, and so do male beetles and butterflies whose wings are often injured thus. Many male fish fight to the death during the breeding season and on the spawning-grounds, and the teeth of the male adult salmon become sharp and differ radically from those of the female. Male lizards can hardly meet during the spring without fighting. Most male birds are pugnacious in the spring, and use beak, claws, and spurs on both wings and legs. With them the season of love is also the season of war. The male of some species is better equipped to drive off all other males than to woo the female. Most mammals are desperate fighters for the females and often develop special weapons of offense and defense in the spring. Male stags are found dead with their horns inextricably locked. Stallions kick and bite, and mane is often protective. Bull seals, elephants, male beavers, giraffes, whales, hares, bears, beasts of prey, antelopes, walruses, buffalo, etc., all are known not only to follow the law of battle often to the death, but to know just how to make the most effective cut, thrust, blow, that their peculiar weapons, whatever their position, make possible. Beards, dewlaps, some accumulations of fat, callosities, and carapaces are essentially protective. Man's anthropoid progenitor fought less with tooth and jaw as he became confirmed in the upright position; the hands were freed from the work of locomotion and used to strike, and weapons were developed.
Long stories of struggles to suppress anger are most fre- quent with girls. Where it has been yielded to with abandon before, there are now manifold efforts to pause and weigh the facts, attempts to bring up counter motives, struggles foi diversion, realizations of how painful its vents and even its facial expressions are to others, and retirements to fight it out alone or conceal its ebullitions. Often, and especially with girls, there is an increased irritability that demands special prophylactics, and explosions now are smothered into sulki- ness. To veil it in smiles usually prolongs it. Revenge is often fondly nursed and its gratifications more studied and elaborate. Sometimes a single spasm of anger seems able to expel affection forever beyond the power of pardon. Many mention a peculiar mental inebriation or exhilaration in it which makes them feel more alive, so that even where its potential does not pass into its kinetic form, but is held in leash, there is an increased sense of both exaltation and power. Often there are a few spasmodic outbursts, which carry the SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 369 individual away into a frenzy of rapt passion, and then the physical reaction of weakness, fatigue, shame, apologies, re- grets for wounded friendships, are experiences which mark a change to a steadier type. Above the sense of satisfaction that justice has been done, the truth spoken, the basis for a new and better understanding laid, arises now the view that, after all, it may be left to others to right the wrongs of the world. At adolescence anger grows more inward, and the effects are less in the somatic and more in the psychic sphere in which a far larger area of causes is now open, and expressions more sanctioned and refined are found. As the mind grows large, there is more space for the subjective expenditure of energy and for thinking unutterable things. Tension is often vented in prolonged physical exercise; religious and altruistic motives are appealed to; the cjiildish forms of biting, striking, scratch- ing, making faces, and all the involuntary modifications of phonation, respiration, and salivation are changed. Often an outbreak causes vasomotor disturbances that begin at this age of instability, and especially during menstruation these psychic weather-signs may affect secretions. One of the chief causes is the thwarting of purpose and expectation, limitations of freedom, a sense of injustice, invasions or repression of the self, and as all these are greatly increased at this age the lia- bilities to anger grow with them. Jealousy, although not originating at this time, takes now a sexual form. Angry feelings now seem to the subject often spontaneous, partly because he can not analyze all the new and complex incite- ments to it, but partly because there are new erethic needs of the system that demand this tension. Now the sense of being misunderstood, contradiction, the very presence of those who are distasteful, distraction, and lofty ways are more liable to inflame the temper. Even in the midst of its greatest heat, an almost independent psychosis of philosophic reflection is often carried on. Sarcastic things to say are thought of, and per- haps written out, but not uttered, and if fury of an epileptic type is not suppressed there is danger of criminality. Anger, " sweeter than honey," as Homer calls it, may be nursed and vented in fantastic schemes of revenge in which some rind it a luxury to revel. It is really an expression of egotism and self-feeling, while the immense role that this invasion by what 37° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE seems like an alien demonic personality may assume is seen in the scores of words in English which indicate it.1 Only weak- lings are incapable of it, and righteous indignation has done much of the best work in the world. But as with love, pity, and fear, a large part of the education of the heart consists in directing it aright or against objects worthy of it. These psychic storms sometimes seem to clear the mental air, give a sense of strength and a keener appreciation of justice, and prompt cowards to be heroes. Up the evolutionary scale they have marked a point where our animal progenitors ceased to flee in fear and turned upon their foe, so that those who ac- quired the power to discharge the most volcanic reactions against their enemies survived, while those who lacked it perished.
III. Fear, or anticipatory pain, is probably the great educa- tor in both the animal and the human world, even science being developed in large measure for prevision or to eliminate shock which is so disintegrating to the system.2 Those who fear aright survive. At adolescence the fear system is modernized and otherwise profoundly reconstructed, and becomes reason- able. Fear of being lost passes over to fear of losing the points of the compass; fear of great animals, real and imagi- nary, diminishes, and that of bugs, spiders, snakes, and creepy things is augmented with the new dermal sensations for mini- mal contact; fear and a desire for protection is less effective in evoking love either for God or man. Dread of diseases, which is often intense and secret, is greatly increased and may become a causative factor, so that if the mind can cure the diseases it can make in adolescence it does much. In general, physical fears decline and social fears increase as do those in the moral and religious realm. The new feeling for per- sonality seems at first to make both God and ghosts more real. There are far more fears that others will suffer. Objects of fear are seen much farther off, and protective activities have a wider range. Many fears are toned down into respect, rever- 1 See my Study of Anger. Am. Jour, of Psy., July, 1899, vol. x, pp. 516-591.
3 This I think a fair inference, although never yet drawn, from all the facts gathered by Groeningen, Ueber den Shock; Wiesbaden, 1885, p. 255; and by Oppenheim, Traumatische Neurosen; Berlin, 1892, p. 253.
SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 37 l ence, and awe, and an increasing proportion of dreads are of psychic rather than of physical suffering. Every new desire means a new fear of failure to attain it. Childish fears are among the very oldest elements of the soul, and the fact that they do not fit present conditions but do fit a past environment so well is the basis of some of the strongest arguments for psychogenesis. The plasticity of the psychophysic organism in youth makes it often peculiarly convulsible.1 Children fear strangers, but adolescents blush in their presence. The Swedish blygscl means both blush and shame, which is partial fear. The chief blushers are adolescent girls, especially in the presence of those of whose sympathy and good opinion they are not well assured. The blush at compliments is the vasomotor survival of a state when to be admired meant danger.
Our data suggest that bashfulness in some directions may go with ostentatious conduct in others. This, however, seems to be exceptional, though not abnormal. Where the nascent sense of the social-self takes the form of diffidence this in the extreme may become almost cataleptic. Respiration, circula- tion, eating and swallowing, speech, common industries like sewing, ciphering, etc., lose precision, and are perhaps more or less inhibited. Automatisms, like giggling, chewing the nails, twisting the hair or clothes, writhing, trembling, and awkwardness in its many forms, where the fundamental move- ments are exaggerated as the accessory are reduced, may appear. The sense of being observed more closely than usual or by strangers or numbers of people is paralyzing to the higher activities and may bring out primordial ones like cry- ing, hiding, etc. All these effects are greatly heightened, not only if the child has been unusually alone or neglected, but if observation of its acts has generally been associated with dis- approval, failure, defect, or has led to ridicule. The really shy, retiring child is sometimes an only child or sickly and undervitalized. Partridge says, " It is generally agreed that blushing increases at puberty." 2 The diffidence of some very genuine young men is almost incredible. They go far out of 1 See my Study of Fears. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1897, vol. viii, pp 147-249. Also L. Dugas: La Timidite"; Paris, 1898; and P. Hartenberg: Les Timides et la Timidite; Paris, 1901.
8 Blushing. Ped. Sem., April, 1897, vol. iv, pp. 387-394.
372 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE their way to avoid meeting a girl on the street who seems to them a being almost too worshipful to speak to. Others can not go into society without the stimulus of some intoxicant to give them boldness. Some are sleepless in advance, imagin- ing every embarrassing gaucherie they feel sure to commit. Some country youth so dread new faces that they become solitary in their habits. Some are so impressed by the su- periority of all who have confident manners that they are speechless in their presence, and their feelings may develop into silent and unsuspected but intense hate. Both blushing and flushing are subject to very wide variations in the manner and place where they begin, in their causes, in the subjective and somatic feelings that accompany them, and in their reac- tions, mental and physical. In morbid blushers, there may be tremors, mental confusion, chill, weakness, dizziness, stutter- ing, etc. A perusal of this literature suggests to me when I have never seen mentioned, that we have here in every respect a perfect, though miniature and circumscribed, epilepsy with its aura, its crisis, and its reactions, and that this adds a very interesting point of attack for the further study of this inter- esting psychosis.
Socrates thought modesty one of the very best adornments of youth because it involved docility and a sense of something above and beyond yet to be attained, while a too early sense of confidence and lack of deference is often a sign of preco- cious arrest. An interesting fact that seems brought out by returns is that while boys in general are more prone to the overt forms of showing off, they often incline in early adolescence a little toward modesty, and girls, usually a little more retiring at this period, now become for a time less so. Possibly this may be reminiscent of a time when the human female, formerly like the female in the animal world less beautiful than the male, by ornament or a new access of attrac- tion from nature became more so, and the initial forwardness of girls may be a rudiment of the age when woman was the active agent in domesticating man and developing the family father in the way Bachofen and Drummond suggest. On this view woman must once have had courtship proclivities for a prolonged period after as well as before motherhood. Her endeavor was to hold man by her own attractions to his duties SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 373 and responsibilities in the long ages that preceded marriage which clenched these obligations. Thus the inherited effects of a primeval desire to hold are now added perhaps by tachy- genesis to the maiden desire to win him. If this be correct, modern woman's wish to please is the survival of a not yet spent momentum of her culminating achievement in the great work of domestication.
Intense consciousness of others and perhaps even artificial conduct are a necessary disciplinary stage, but excess makes character hollow, dramatic, and attitudinizing. The tendency of both extremes of this is toward a type recognized by recent writers in characterology from Nietzsche to Ribery l as amorphous or unstable. Youth must also hew out their own lives and develop personalities of their own without modeling them too much on alkn patterns, for thus only can they ac- quire character which gives a basis to just self-confidence and due self-assertion.
IV. Pity. Few sentiments undergo a greater increase of both depth and range at this age than those of sympathy and pity.2 These feelings are not highly developed in chil- dren, but become exquisite in youth. Few of its former ex- citants now lose power, but nearly all are greatly increased and a vast number of new ones arise. Romance is usually now more pathogenic than fact, because youth often has little per- sonal acquaintance with poverty, illness, evil, and human suffering generally. In Chapter XIII we saw what Passion Week now means for this feeling. The irrevocableness of the past, too, that makes every tick of the clock a requiem, the self-pity of cramped conditions in one's own childhood, the sense that our souls are larger than our destiny can be, that we have the elements of a greatness we can never attain: all this intensified by the sad autumn psychoses of falling leaf and fading flower, and by that of twilight, often make youth lacrimose and its very heart to wail, but it all seasons and sobers us to maturity. Tenderness of heart should now sup- 1 Essai de classification naturelle du caract&re. Paris, 1902, p. 156. * Pity, by F. H. Saunders and myself. Am. Jour, of Psy., July, 1900, vol. xi, 374 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE press callous ways. The latter are degenerative, but the former, which brings the heart into sympathetic vibration with every order of life, is the mark of superiority and even of genius. The sad fact is, however, that instead of broadening now to a full humanistic altruism and knowing how every type of sorrow feels, this instinct may narrow to some few fetishistic forms. It should ripen into benevolence, charity, kindness, and universal good-will. Sympathy, if Sutherland is right, is not merely an esthetic principle to be interpreted on the narrow basis of Greek tragedy, but it is the germ of all the moral faculties and strikes its roots deep down into the world of gregarious animal life. Hence, more even than fear and anger, it needs the most careful guidance in its stage of efflorescence, and its problem is closely bound up with that of moral education. Even the ideals of a gentleman and of a lady often center in these powers of sympathetic apprecia- tion.
One form of sensitiveness common in adolescents ex- presses itself in an extreme reluctance to dissent from the opinions or purposes of others, especially adults. Sympathy is so quick and ready that all the mental energy is expended in trying to get into the closest rapport with alien sentiments and self-assertion is for a time almost entirely in abeyance. We have many records of long statements of religious views, judgments of character, purposes and intentions, interpreta- tions of current events, verdicts by gossip of happenings in small communities, which are held and perhaps actively as- sented to and helped along in a way which sometimes causes entire misapprehension by the adult; or they are mistaken as promises where none were intended, and may utterly belie the real interests, beliefs, and plans of the hearer, who effaces himself to a degree that he finds an object of astonishment afterward, and doing so only because his entire energies are so focused in anticipating and reenforcing what is heard that there is nothing left in him with which to dissent. This is sometimes based on an almost morbid delicacy of feeling, which makes any shade of disagreement seem a form of hardi- hood that is too much of a strain upon the callow character.
With Rousseau, there seems to have been a spice of conscious flattery in this sensitiveness. It often prompts people to say SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 375 what they think will please and to even swerve from the truth to gratify a friend. Young women not infrequently acquire the reputation of lying solely from their passion of accommo- dating themselves to their guests or neighbors. This, too, is now perhaps a legitimate expression of the social instinct which has not yet found the true balance between adjusting and adapting to the tastes of others and to just self-expression. Some carry their self-abnegation so far that, divining by a rapport that seems almost mystic, the lines of tastes and likes, they develop almost a passion for saying only what ministers to these. Their compliance can be sometimes so played upon that they make the most self-contradictory statements. This in extreme makes the social parasite and political henchman. It was utilized by the Greeks by apprenticeship to a mentor who must never do or say an unworthy act or word before his protege, and suggests the need of hero-worship to rightly direct the passion of admiration. The opposite instinct of opposition, also strong now, is an outcrop in the psychic field of the tendency to vary, in biology. Together they enable man to adjust to new environments.1 V. Love of home versus the impulse to leave it. One of the best measures of domestication in animals or of civiliza- tion in man is the intensity of iove of home. This is a very complex feeling and made up of many ties, hard to dissect, or even to enumerate. Kline 2 attempts to analyze the factors of love of home, in the order of their intensity, as follows: love 1 Small's observations cited above are here in point. After talking of perfume for suggestion, he sprayed distilled water in school-rooms, and asked classes up the grades how many smelled the perfume. In the two lower grades the majority did so, and there was only one to five per cent of skeptics. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades the decline was most rapid, and in the eighth and high school grades nearly all were skeptics. Unfortunately, Small's tests for illusions of sight, taste, motion, heat, cold, and touch, were not carried up the grades, so that while we may surmise a similar growth of incredulity with puberty in these respects, it is not yet proved. From his studies of imitation and neuroses induced by sugges- tion, dramatic imitation, and especially school fads, of which latter he studied one hundred and eighty-two different forms, it would appear that certain kinds of imi- tation are increased and others decreased at puberty, but we have not yet sufficient data to formulate a law.
2 The Migratory Impulse vs. Love of Home. Am. Jour, of Psy., October, 1898, vol. x, pp. i— 81. Historically the tribe precedes the family.
376 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of parents, scenery, house, familiar ways, freedom of opinion and conduct, relatives and friends, animals, pleasant memories, sympathy, etc. We often find specified also the room, articles of furniture, the garden, hills, trees, rocks, meadow, streams, frankness of expression, leisure to do as one pleases, liberty to arrange things to one's taste. All these make up the con- tent of that magic word, home, of which the hearth with its altar-fire is the heart. It inclines to settled habits of life, is the converse of the roving instinct, and is largely woman s creation.