etc., are never more important in this respect. Never is mankind so influenced by quality of voice as in adolescence. This is not only the unconscious medium of likes and dislikes, but is often specified as the very first charm in the other sex. So instinctive is imitation that the young ought always to hear better and never worse voices than their own.
Singing is the most universal language, because it is the language of feeling. Piety, patriotism, all the racial and domestic sentiments and love of nature can be thus trained. Teachers of singing have drifted very far from the intent of nature in this respect. Love, home, war, religion, country, and rhythm generally, it is their first duty to preform in the heart. The merely technical process of reading notes is a small matter compared with the education of the sentiments. Their function is to direct a gymnastics of the emotions, to see that no false feelings are admitted, to open the soul to sympathy and social solidarity. " Where singing is not," said Luther, " the devil enters; " and " I will not look at a teacher who can not sing." Melody, har- mony, the dynamism of soft and loud, quality and cadence, are the purest epitome and vehicle of the higher moral qualities. Without them the range or depth of the life of the heart suffers. Song should expurgate every evil passion and banish care and fatigue. Even the Chinese call their crude music the science of sciences, and think har- mony connected with the function of government and the state; as Plato said, a reform in music would mean a political revolution, and Melanchthon called it the theology of the heart. Young and old meet in this art, for much of the life of feeling is as independent of age as of culture. The voice is the practical basis of all music. The larynx is, like the face, a barometer and register of feeling. Aristotle said music molded character as gymnastics do the body.
Behnke and Brown collected opinions from two hundred teachers 32 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of singing on eight questions concerning children's voices.1 Most agree that boy choristers do not excel as singers later. Only fifteen think boys can sing through mutation, holding that the voice goes to pieces then if not exercised. Many think train- ing before puberty has little, and some say no effect on the voice afterward. Children can not understand good music or feel it before. It is impossible to predict from the child's voice what it will become when adult. Seiler goes to the extreme of saying that it is useless to train the voice before puberty, but musical intelligence can be helped, and the power of hearing music through the voice, which is the best mode of appreciating it, can be trained. Little chil- dren only are aided in vocalization by dancing while they sing. It aids respiration, strengthens the lungs, helps digestion, and the consensus is that from eleven to puberty, when the child's voice is at its best, cultivation is valuable musically; many advocate beginning at the age of two or three with very gentle, soft, and simple melodies, and that there should be a generous period of singing by imitation. It is, in fact, as absurd to begin singing by notes before a repertory of songs is acquired as it would be to teach language from a primer before the power of speech was acquired.
Finally, we have no sympathy with the view that great solicitude should be exercised to prevent any but pure tones at adolescence, for nature seems to decree that the young should utter every kind and degree of emotion vocally; this takes us far outside the narrow limits laid down by precisians and drill-masters, and we believe that the self-consciousness so common in schools concerning song is a peda- gogic artifact, due to either too little or too fastidious practise, and that voices ought to be harsh, raw, and awkward for a season. The chief evil of self-consciousness is artificiality in tone production that tends to throat strain and chronic soreness. Declamation and recita- tion may perhaps be made to afford an adequate basis for vocal train- ing, especially if the selection be interesting and adapted to the senti- ments of the young. Singing and speaking are at the best when the subject-matter occupies the center of attention and rules are relegated to the background, while music, like cadences, must fit the words. The prime question in all singing, declamation, etc., is, What feelings and ideas do they express? All other things are accessory, and all tech- nique is bad, however good per se, if it diverts teacher or pupil from the chief end of giving utterance to strong, normal, and uplifting sen- timents. The moral purpose thus overtops and conditions all others.
VI. Vision. — The eye is the seat of the sense of form, color, light, and shade, and is in most persons the sense nearest the 1 See F. E. Howard: The Child Voice in Singing. N. Y., 1898. Also Kafe. mann: Die Erkrankungen der Sprechstimme. Danzig, 1899. Vierordt: Physiol. des Kindes-Alters. Treitel iiber die Stimme kleiner Kindern. Centralblatt 1 CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 33 mind. Young children excel adults in detecting dim forms in the dark, and probably in fine spatial discriminations. Although we have no satisfactory experimental tests, it is probable that children distinguish grades of light and shade rather minutely before the perception of colors is much developed. There is also reason to think that the periphery of the retina, which receives images from objects in indirect vision, although not so extended as in the adult, has more power to roll the eye re- flexly until it is brought into direct vision, and that the foveal power is now increased. As the brow, eyebrows, cheek-bones, and nose, which normally increase in the teens, narrow the field of vision, it would seem that the difference of power between the fovea and the retinal periphery is increased.
In Chicago, among 2,030 boys and 2,735 gir\s> Smedley found 32 per cent ©f the former and 37 per cent of the latter with visual defects. These increased rapidly during the first three years of school life, decreasing after the age of nine, first slowly, then more rapidly, till the age of thirteen was passed. From ten onward, those with visual defect stand lower than those whose sight is normal, and the same was found to be true for nearly all ages in cases of defective hearing.
Judgments of form are now more correct, and the power to grasp large and complex forms as a whole is augmented. Gilbert marked off 62 cm., and asked children to translate the visual impression into muscle sense by moving the arm through a distance thought to be the same; he found that it was over- judged at no age, so that " we underestimate distance trans- lated from the sense of sight to the muscle sense. Boys are less accurate than girls from six to ten; then the reverse is the case." The age of greatest correctness was fifteen. He also tested children from six to eighteen, by asking them to estimate the number of inches between two marks twenty inches apart. At the age of six, these comparative estimates were only about one-fifth the real distance, and up to fifteen the distance was al- ways judged too short; fifteen to sixteen was the most accu- rate age, and older people overestimate perhaps because their method changes to marking off imaginary distances with the eye on the principle that a full space seems larger than an empty space. Judgments improve very rapidly in both sexes to about eleven, after which they progress much more gradually.
34 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Griffing 1 shows " that the extensive threshold or ability to receive and retain a number of simultaneous retinal impres- sions is a function of individual growth, reaching its maximum only when the observer is fully developed." The maximum numbers of letters seen at once shows a marked increase at puberty and on through high school and college. The tendency to guess decreases with maturity. The great gain from high school to college is especially noteworthy.
Again, the perception of form is now gradually emanci- pated from other associated sensations, coming into closer rapport with the brain and with psychic processes, and all visual estimates improve.
In testing children with objects, the size and weight of which varied independently and sometimes inversely, Dress- lar 2 found that there was no apparent gain from the age of seven to fourteen in the capacity to separate visual impressions from pressure, but that the size confused the estimate of weight almost equally for all these ages.
Gilbert also tested the influence of suggestion by seen size as affecting the estimated weight of lifted objects, and found that from nine the increase in accuracy for both sexes coin- cided tolerably with the age of fourteen, and that at fifteen and sixteen there was a diminution followed by a rapid increase to seventeen.
Another interesting psychic change, which takes place in childhood and youth, has been suggested by Wolfe,3 who found that our notions of the size of different objects differ widely. Young children underestimate the size of coins and bills; mature people overestimate the size of the former. The great individual differences in these estimates of children grow quite uniform with the dawn of the teens. It would seem that to young children a merriory image seems smaller than its object, while in many adults it may exceed. This suggests that draw- ing might concern itself more with size.
We also find changes due to modifications of interest. Fine 1 On the Development of Visual Perception and Attention. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1896, vol. vii, p. 227.
2 Psychology of Touch. Am. Jour, of Psy., June, 1894, vol. vi, pp. 50-54.
8 Some Judgments on the Size of Familiar Objects. Am. Jour, of Psy., Janu- CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 35 differences of face, figure, the fit of clothes, grace in motion, or in outline drawings now have a new meaning. We begin to take in our esthetic, social, and natural environment with a larger ken. We see better what feeds nascent interests and ignore that which appeals to dying ones, and yet there is greater capacity to see all things, self included, from the standpoint of the neutral spectator. Words are read in outline without per- ception of the letters that compose them. Some returns indi- cate new interests in tracing mazes and figure ornaments, and in grouping repeated visual impressions, as pickets, bricks in the sidewalk, etc. Form begins to come to its independent rights, and we see the beauty of symmetry and proportion, group items to larger unities, count and aggregate impressions, take pleasure in things afar, landscapes, and the heavens which no other sense can attain, and there is pleasure in arranging, dividing, and intricating details. Thus perhaps the constella- tions were first imaged.
The color sense, which appeals more to sentiment, now ac- quires a deeper meaning, and if children see light and shade best, adolescents far excel them in response to the chromatic world about them; the hues of blossoms and of clouds, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, etc., now give new satisfaction. Colors have a suggestive and symbolic power, and associations are widely irradiated and established. Crimson suggests blood; yellow, gold; etc. There is new esthetic pleas- ure and pain in the harmony and contrast of colors. Their power to excite and depress, which Goethe first investigated in a colored room, and which makes the poetry of colors, is now deeply felt.
Luckey 1 found that the power to see colors in indirect vision increased with age, but that the lack of this power in children was compensated by a greater proportional range for black and white than for color as compared with adults.
Wolfe * found that so far as could be inferred from the 1 Comparative Observations on the Indirect Color Range of Children, Adults, and Adults trained in Color. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1895, vol. vi, pp.
a The Color Vocabulary of Children.
36 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE extent and accuracy of color vocabularies, the delicacy and discriminative power of children increased rapidly at first, but that girls make but little progress after the eleventh year, al- though boys continue to advance until at seventeen there is great improvement in discrimination of violet, orange, and pink, in this order. The power to see and name violet cor- rectly appears from his tables to be chiefly during adolescence, girls having the advantage throughout.
Gilbert showed ten colors nearly alike to each child; he measured acuteness of chromatic sensibility by the average number of colors considered to be the same, and found a rapid increase of sensitiveness to ten or twelve, which then more slowly increased to a maximum at sixteen for girls.
The sense of sight craves stronger stimuli. Loud colors, high lights, and striking contrasts are preferred, and taste for mild hues, subdued tones, and delicate tints comes later. Some think the range of the color scale is extended and that the red end of the spectrum and far more the blue and violet end is developed. There is much reason to believe that finer color discrimination in intensity and wave length and degrees of light and shade arises. The color world is at any rate almost regenerated and recreated and all its esthetic effects greatly enhanced. Dress, flowers, clouds and sky, chromatic patterns and all variegated paintings in Nature's art gallery are not only perceived more clearly, but are inwardly felt and affect moods. Favorite colors acquire character and individuality and by new analogies come to be associated with moral and intel- lectual qualities, while their symbolism irradiates far into the world of tone, ethics, and religion, as well as esthetics, and they have new power over the heart. Color preferences may be so marked as to shade everything controllable about the person and the environment, and sometimes aversions are no less pro- nounced. These often change, perhaps repeatedly, and may be reversed, so that colors most loved will become unpleasant, and vice versa. Perhaps everything must be colored, and the soul becomes impressionable to what was before unnoticed, and new central associations and interpretations arise. Combina- tions painful to cultivated taste may be for a time a delight. This secondary quality, which brain or soul is energized to create, is laid on to the entire visible world like a lavish coat CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 37 of variegated fresh paint, and at the same time is given an ab- stract value of its own quite independent of form.
Indeed, form often suffers in appreciation for a time at the expense of the new color life of vision. Outlines and propor- tions are less keenly felt, but this should be and normally is only for a season, and the sense of the beauty that lies in these has later its innings. Then the charm of contour, beginning in the limited field of a few objects, grows acute and discrimina- tive and slowly widens from the human to the animal, plant, and inorganic world. Features, every article of dress, points in pets, the utensils of play and work, sights and individual objects in nature, drawing apart from painting, not only come again to their rights, but have their own value both discrimina- tive and esthetic if the development of the sensory is not prema- turely checked, in a way pregnant with suggestion for courses of artistic training that seek to follow rather than force nature. It is as if the retinal cones, if they mediate color, or their cere- bral endings and connections, precede the rods and their an- nexes in the adolescent push upward to the adult plane, only to be followed by the latter when their nascent period comes.
VII. General Craving. — In these changes of sensory re- sponse to the objective world, it is often difficult, as we have indicated, to say how much is due to new interests or to high- er lability or potentialization of brain cells, and how much, if any, is left to be explained by changes in the peripheral organs of sense themselves. Among the 14,000 different sensations which Kiilpe thinks can be discriminated, many may be grad- ually lost and others developed by attention and fixed habit. There is, no doubt, an important change in the relative prom- inence of the different senses in our psychic life at this stage with its new emotions, interests, and apathies. Adolescent years mark the golden age of sense, which is so prone to be- come sensual if uncontrolled. Then the soul exposes most surface, as it were, to the external world. The eye gate and ear gate especially are open their widest, and not only that, but the feeling tone and the general sense feeling, so largely in- dependent of perception, are also at their best, so that the pos- sibilities of knowing our world and acquiring experience on the one hand, and of lapsing to a life of indulgence, are now 38 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE most developed. It has been suggested that this latter may be somewhat inversely as discriminative power, but this view is partial and needs the most careful limitation. When we re- member that there is almost no such thing as memory for feel- ings themselves, but only for the conceptions wrhich accom- pany or are reen forced by them, we can see how the reminis- cences of adults on this point must be received with caution.
In fine, we must conceive the traffic inward along all the sensory tracts augmented in a curve of increment yet to be more exactly charted, and all the sensory areas of the brain to be both more highly sensitized and flooded with masses of impressions that for a time are confused and very imperfectly understood or worked off into their normal channels of reac- tion, and properly coordinated. The growth of the sex organs and functions sends inward a confused mass of impressions that can not be interpreted or at first even localized. Especially is this true of girls, because their organs are both more inward and relatively larger in size and function. These, too, give a feeling of intensified existence, sentiments of strange, nameless yearning, aimless unrest, moments of rapture and fulness of life and joy abounding, alternating perhaps with misgiving and periods of slight depression which can not be explained, as if the soul were in the hands of some deep, mysterious, but fateful principle that had power to play at its own alien and capricious will upon all its frets and strings. An indescribable rapture supervenes when we wake or sleep, and then its charm fades and leaves the world a little somber with the sense of some vanished good. Some supreme goal that seemed near retreats to a distance that seems unattainable. Both these states and their fluctuations, poetry, art, romance, and religion have described in their polymorphic shapes in countless ways and with all the imagery available in earth's scenery chambers.
Thus one of the most characteristic descriptions of this period is that it is preeminently the age of sense, and hence prone to sensuousness not only in taste and sex, where the danger is greatest, but in the domain of each of the sense species. Every centripetal nerve glows and tingles with new life, and every in-going fiber is freighted and even gorged with the traffic of impressions. Never is the body so imperiously dominant and so insistently in evidence, and never is the ex- CHANGES IN THE SENSES AND THE VOICE 39 ternal world so ineluctable and impressively real, as in this im- pressionistic age. Never is objective and subjective experience so vivid and so manifold. Youth is in its world, in the closest rapport with it possible to man. It not only lights but often burns his soul. He would touch it at every point, explore its every possibility, receive everything it has to give, and revel in it to intoxication. All this is his right and his necessity, only it must neither lead to perversion or become so overwhelmingly absorbing as to cause arrest or degeneration. Thus the soul is furnished; for, whatever our philosophy, it is never so nearly true as at this age, that there is nothing in the intellect that does not get there through the senses, for now the chief activity of the mind is working over the sense capital thus acquired.
CHAPTER X EVOLUTION AND THE FEELINGS AND INSTINCTS CHARACTERISTIC OF NORMAL ADOLESCENCE \version to genetic views of the soul owing to undue interest in its future — Neglect of its somatic and historic relations by modern ultra idealism and epistemology — Evils of pure speculation and extreme dualism — Neglect of lessons from animals, children, and savages — Barrenness of systems and speculations for knowledge of the feelings — Postulates of a true genetic psychology and its biological basis — A new evolutionary concept of soul — Adolescent changes in instincts and feelings, alternations between inertness and excitement, pleasure and pain, self-confidence and humility, selfishness and altruism, society and solitude, sensitiveness and dulness, knowing and doing, conservatism and iconoclasm, sense and intellect — Necessity of developing all tendencies freely before the age of consistency and unity — The interval be- tween pithecoid and primitive man — Phyletic and individual correlates — Ado- lescence to advance up the age scale.
BEFORE considering the normal psychic changes that oc- cur during the period of sexual maturity, it is necessary at the outset to state in a brief and summary way — because the topic is to be dwelt on more fully in another book — the general con- ceptions of the soul that underlie and condition the treatment of adolescence and childhood, especially because the standpoint is different from that of our psychological and philosophical con- temporaries, and, we believe, embodies a new idea of profound scientific and practical importance which has a great and as- sured future.
It may be roughly characterized as in some sense a new and higher monism and an evolutionism more evolved, with a method which has already yielded some promising results hitherto unattained and a program of far more work yet to be done, which is little in harmony with the complacent sense of finality and completeness so often manifest. From this standpoint it becomes plain how gross have been the errors in both conceiving and practically training the soul, which are due to the inexpugnable and all-dominant interest in its future 40 FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 41 state and the insistent and, to our thinking, not only unscien- tific but almost abnormal aversion to consider its past. This genetophobia pervades, consciously or often unconsciously, much of the best ancient and contemporary philosophical and theological thought, and is one of the greatest and most invet- erate obstacles to a truly scientific psychology. The problem of the nature of the soul has also rarely, save in forms of materialism now generally discarded, been separated from that of a future life, has led to a horror of materialism that is almost misophobia, and has betrayed many able professors to take an attitude toward genetic psychology like that of Agassiz toward evolution. Like every other prevalent aberration of the human mind, this has deep historic roots, several of which must be roughly indicated to understand it. It began in the Western mind with " the fall of man in Socrates and Plato." In turn- ing to the study of man, they neglected nature and disparaged the naive and unconscious in the human soul. It was assumed that there was no good even in unreasoned virtue, which could not be really such until it became noetic and sophisticated. He who knew the right and did not do it, instead of thereby increasing his guilt, was already more than half-way to per- fection.
I. The doctrine of anamnesis or reminiscence first admitted a most significant past to the psyche, but it was in a transcendent world which had endowed it with only just those ideas which Plato held to and of which he made Socrates the midwife in this life. Education culminated in their recovery to conscious- ness. Metempsychosis had also yet earlier held to a past for the soul, and Nemesis and Karma were doctrines of retribution and reward for the next previous state. Since ancient Greece, however, categories or innate ideas, as Trendelenberg and Laas well show, have been the goal or the basis or both of most philosophic systems, but from Aristotle's ten to Kant's twelve, they have been underived and Melchizedician, as holy to the disciples of each school as the Mosaic tables, till Spencer sug- gested that even all of those that were valid, although a priori and innate in the individual, were acquired by the race. This proposition will always be abhorrent to every pure intuition- alist mind that has a passion for absolute presuppositionless beginnings.
42 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Christianity, too, has shown little interest in the past of the soul, save for that of its founder and in order to account for sin. Its emphasis on personal immortality gave the soul immense and unprecedented dignity, but focused attention and endeavor upon its future. Even the traducianism of Tertul- lian, who taught that the soul was in some sense hereditary and had a somatic continuity with previous generations back to Adam, found little vogue, helpful as it was in explaining the mystery of transmitted sin and guilt, and was twice condemned as a heresy, although Luther seems to have held it. Some form of creationism, or the view that at a certain age of the embryo a newly and miraculously made soul joined the body ab extra, has been the prevailing one. The soul of the natural man is tainted, corrupt, and children depraved perhaps totally at birth, and the supreme work of life is to save it from eternal woe. Asceticism demeaned this life for the sake of the next, and as the soul and its destiny became glorious, the body was macer- ated and its regimen neglected. The world was made out of brute matter, chaos, or from nothing, but no one ever even asked of what the soul was made. In condemning every form of the doctrine of preexistence of the soul, the Church lost some