It is, however, a recent development, and children, true to their function of revealing the past, sometimes almost as soon as they have acquired the upright method of locomotion as if intoxicated by " out-of-doors," start off, and by some inner impulse, go on and on with no idea of where or why, tempted by an open gate or by the instinct to follow a man or vehicle, or as a just-hatched chick follows any moving thing. Some- times these outbreaks are periodic or due to being shut up too much. When a little older they may sell all their trinkets, and as they go leave their luggage, then coat, hat, shoes, etc., by the way, as if with progressive dislike of the accouterments of civilization. When this truant instinct is strong and hered- itary, as is often the case, tying will not prevent it, and where the child feels the impulse to abandon everything and go with the birds, dog, car, circus, clouds, or to see where the road goes, to see what will come next, etc., this may be irresistible and almost epileptic. Such children often have a weak instinct for property, act by fits and starts, have few toys and little spending money, perhaps are underfed at home, are indifferent to rags and dirt, but may be bright, pretty, and well adapted to beg and make their way in the world. One of the strongest motives for running away from both home and school in young children is, as we saw, to get to and play in the water. While the blind impulse to be off and away, or to go for the sake of going, is strongest soon after children can walk, and declines pretty steadily during the early years of life, the summer leads all other seasons, until from the ages of eight to ten. Spring runaways then begin to exceed those at any, and at fourteen, exceed those at all other seasons combined, continuing to do so for some years. Ennui, malaria, space-hunger, horror of SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 377 familiar environments and habitual duties, and spring fever are comparatively infrequent as long as children are sexually neuter; but at puberty, reaction against the confinement of winter impels many to leave the hibernating quarters and makes some habitual vagrants.
At the dawn of adolescence this impulse to migrate or wander shows a great and sudden increase. The restlessness of spring is greatly augmented. Home seems narrow, monoto- nous, intolerable, and the street and the motley passers-by interest and invite to be up and away. Injured feelings, wounded 'amour propre, love of nature and solitude, a sense that their environment is above or perhaps below them, anger and resentment, reaction against authority; impatience of all restraint, dread of tedium, and a desire — to use Kline's phrase — " to shelve all old 'impressions/' and "indulge a yearning for and into space/' an intensification of the motor-sense that makes riding or going a charm and sedative, and, above all, the impulse to test themselves by measuring their powers with those of others, to find how they stand and rank, and whether they are weaklings or heroes, to see the great world and find out what it is, to find the luck that must be lurking for them somewhere, or to set up for themselves and begin life on their own hook — these are the motives, this the strong reenforcement of the roving impulse, that makes the boy in the school-room chafe like a caged bird in the season of migra- tion. It is the age when by far the most children satisfy the legal requirements of school attendance and leave it forever. This instinct, if not normally developed and then reduced again by the right correctives, has many strange forms of per- sistence into adult life in the gad-abouts, globe-trotters, vaga- bonds, rovers, gipsies, tramps, or those interesting psychic species who move or change their vocation, go from country to city, from housekeeping to boarding, the swappers and traders of all they possess, an unique type of travelers, with no purpose but to go, boatmen and trainmen, who for love of it can not leave their vocation, the passionate shoppers, meeting and funeral goers, gossips and newsmongers, hunters, fisher- men, and other restless classes who are averse to all static conditions, and in whom the home-making instinct is dying out. Kline undertook to classify by age the strength of 63 3/8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE motives which impelled to first leave home. His curve shows the love of adventure rising very rapidly to ten and almost steadily thereafter to nineteen, when his survey ends. At the latter age, this, he thinks, accounts for nearly sixty per cent of all cases. The motive of seeing the opposite sex, which begins at thirteen, rises at nineteen to nearly thirty per cent. The motive of starting in life shows also a marked adolescent rise, while the desire to see nature as a motive declines, and loneliness, very strong in childhood, is almost extinct as a motive at fourteen. Spring, of course, is the mating, as it is the migrating, season. Most of the migrations of savage man, in his three stages, frugivorous, fishing, and hunting, in whom the Wanderlust is strong, and most of the great historic migra- tions, from the old hypothetical home of man in Eurasia, oc- curred in the spring. Vacant souls are at no season so irksome to their possessors. Climatology, hunger, and need of a higher rate of metabolism, and many other factors are, of course, involved, but we can not fail to associate spring fever and the increased love of freedom and independence at the onset of puberty with the basal instinct, which shows itself statistically in the vernal increase in the number of marriages and the number of illegitimate children who are then begotten. The scholares vagantes, who spent the vacations of the medieval universities in roving, with specially granted licenses and im- munities both to do so and to beg, sing, and write letters for the unschooled peasantry, and who displayed their small learn- ing and courted rural maidens, were manifesting secondary sexual qualities and illustrating the courting and nest-making instincts in their callow stirrings as truly as, though less ob- viously, than the jongleuds and troubadours of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whose methods have been called the most refined of all the expressions of mate-seeking propensities.
Notwithstanding many interesting recent special studies upon vari- ous aspects of the subject, we still know far too little of the psychology of the migratory versus the sessile instincts in men and animals. It seems to be a biological law that animals require a certain range and are injured by greatly transcending or restricting it. Young, in 1885, showed that, other conditions being constant, and within considerable limits, the larger the vessel in which tadpoles were reared the larger they grew. Insular animals, too, are usually smaller than their con- SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 379 tinental congeners, and smaller trout are usually found in smaller streams. Many animals reported by De Varigny, Jordan, Delboeuf, and others, if not well domesticated, seem to be reduced in size by captivity. Every form of animal life has its optimum temperature most favorable to nutrition and growth, its optimum amount of average light, moisture, oxygen, electricity, atmospheric pressure, quality and amount of food and drink, and if any of these slowly change, or there are changes within the organism itself with reference to these cosmic or telluric conditions, there must be readjustment or re-acclimatiza- tion during a period of more or less conscious discontent; hence the changed metabolism, body temperature, and new appetites of pubes- cence. Careful experiments show that polliwogs and still lower forms of life, in a trough of water some yards long, one end of which can be cooled and the other heated, tend to settle at that intermediate point where the temperature is most favorable for their growth, or seek their metabolic optimum and migrate from one end of the trough toward the other as this point changes, as lobsters migrate from deep to shal- low water in the spring'and back again in the fall. Sand-crabs come down the hill to the water to lay eggs in the spring and return, leaving the young to follow them later, a habit akin to that of the common toad. Then, many forms of life on sea and land are drawn to the shore to breed. Anadromous fish, like the mackerel, shad, bluefish, menhaden, herring, migrate mostly horizontally, but often more or less bythmical- ly, and so do many catadromous fish, like eels, which are born in the sea, go up the rivers to mature and then return to the sea, which they never leave. The salmon, that " king of fish " which can leap twelve feet perpendicularly out of water, has a migration frenzy when pushing from the sea up rivers sometimes more than a thousand miles, which brings it to its destiny often with the skin in rags, and its fins, tail, eyes, and head bruised and torn. Some of our birds, like the bobolink, go north in the spring from Florida, and from the Middle or New England States turn west, sometimes as far as Montana, returning by the same circuitous route, because it was the way by which they entered the west; while eastern birds come and go via Texas and Mexico from and to Central America, where they winter. Many birds leave the south when weather and food are of the best to penetrate the bleak north too early in spring with a regularity as sure as the almanac. The retreat of the glaciers, which by annual freezing and thawing narrowed and widened the subsistence areas, can not account for all of even bird migration; neither can climate, for birds do not follow a constant temperature. Their migrations are often east and west, but it is coming to be held that it is changes in the reproductive organs that first upset the fit of environment and separated food from breeding areas. While condi- tions that make the food supply constant through the year often check migration, sterility causes the barren members of the same group to refuse to migrate. The lemming and about a dozen species of rodents migrate, as do reindeer, antelopes, some squirrels, and wolves, while horses, cows, sheep, dogs, cats, hens, ducks, and turkeys often revert 380 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE to the feral habit of wandering, especially in the mating season, and of 'hiding their young.
Primitive man perhaps originated in the tropics, was frugivorous, and, if he followed food, his migrations were seasonal. When he learned to subsist on fish, especially from inland lakes, he became more settled. The hunting stage, which may have persisted far longer than civilization, placed an immense premium on wandering and the results of a lucky arrow or find. The nomadic life preceded and very likely was far longer than settled agriculture has been. Helwald thinks human migration has always been in the direction of the longest axis of the continent. It has been thought that at sea, where temperature and wind are more constant, tides and currents have contributed some- what, as herds of cattle grazing on a prairie swerve to the right or left with the wind. Wallace thinks that man migrated from some not very well-defined area south or southwest of Siberia or the highlands of Central Asia, to the south and east over India and China, crossing to the islands of Australia, southwest to Africa, west to Europe, and perhaps northwest to America, and there are several other schemes of diffusion from other cunabula. In the background of the history of nearly all lands, we have migration. Thus the migratory diathesis had a long prehistoric incubation, and the Huns, Vandals, Goths, Crusades, invasions, and emigrations show that it has not ceased within historic times. The role of spring, at least in these north temperate wander- ings, was marked; the role of youth and love is less clear.
Calhoun, Tuke, Willis, Peters, Kline, and others, have studied the symptoms of home-sickness, or nostalgia, and agree in calling it one of the most complex and distressing of dis- eases when severe. It destroys the appetite, brings nausea, dizziness, palpitation, hallucination, localized pains, sensations of smothering, night sweats, sobbing; in boarding schools, factories, in camps of young soldiers, in hospitals, and on dis- tant voyages, it is especially aggravated by nightfall, katydids, frogs, crickets, the sough of the wind, a long storm, thunder, a letter, waking from dreams of home, a friend, or chance reminder of it, and may swoop down upon the soul like an obsession, bringing melancholy and sometimes even death in its train. At adolescence, when the heart is most sensitive to a malingering form of it, the symptoms of home-sickness are sometimes caused in neurotic girls by the loss of a pet, the felling of a favorite tree, a rearrangement of furniture, change of food; while it often checks menstruation, reduces all ana- bolic and favors katabolic processes, so that they literally ache for home. The yearning soul would break away from the SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 3Sl body, and may lose sympathy with man and beast about it. Idleness both intensifies and increases liability to it, while a battle or a lively personal encounter is perhaps its most sure and complete cure. The young yeoman, who has never left his own glebe, dreads crowds, fears parents might die, or that something untoward would happen if he was away, and pre- fers his own ways and to entertain rather than to be enter- tained.
Adolescence is really the age of nostalgia according to Widal,1 and Kline 2 says, " My impression, based on medical literature and other material, is that in quality or intensity nostalgia is just as severe and, if allowed, will lead to as fatal results before as after adolescence, but that the latter is more predisposed to an attack than either childhood or manhood." Papillon 3 says, " Nostalgia attacks by preference young peo- ple and those just entering youth." Kline collected one hun- dred and sixty-six cases, and found that eighty per cent of these occurred for the first time between twelve and eighteen. This, of course, is partly due to the fact that absence from home, which is the condition of nostalgia, most frequently occurs then.
An interesting expression of a kindred instinct in older girls for a larger and freer social life under the repressions to which they are subjected by modern conditions is seen in a volume of letters from one hundred girls in answer to a personal advertisement requesting cor- respondence without acquaintance with young women of means and education, which is full of suggestiveness for the psychoses of this age of life, whatever be our opinion of the method of collecting such data, or of the propriety of publishing them.4 Most of the writers are cul- tivated, traveled, and not a few are college graduates, while nearly all seem to be themselves entirely respectable and frequently have the best of homes. Most are conscious of the recklessness of answering per- sonals, but are fascinated by the mystery of the " locked box," or over- come by their curiosity to penetrate the incognito of the advertiser, who calls himself a " gentleman of high social and university position.'' Many give their personal history, an inventory of their likes, dislikes.
1 Die. Eng. des Sci. Me"dicales, pp. 357-380.
?The Migratory Impulse vs. Love of Home. Am. Jour, of Psy., October 3 Pop. Sci. Mo., 1874, vol. v, pp. 215-220.
4 Girls Who Answer Personals, by Arthur MacDonald. Washington, Decerr 382 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE accomplishments or points of beauty, and sometimes sign their true name, enclose a photograph, or are ready to accept a call or clandestine meeting or a walk. Most have little to do, and suffer from the monot- ony of an aimless, idle, and psychically solitary life. Many have lost one or both parents, so that home life is not satisfactory. Reserve or imperfect relations of confidence toward those of nearer environment tends to compensation by an almost confessional frankness to some far-off unknown person. Nearly all, in obvious innocence, drift at once to the eternal theme of love, and quote poetry, philosophical theories, or current literature, or express social and personal opinions that seem decidedly risque to maturer minds. Views of love, life, freedom, art, death, marriage, and even sex are expressed with a dash and brilliancy that is sometimes as fascinating as anything in the best current litera- ture, and which shows that these young souls have leaped to the realization of many of the deepest and truest insights which modern culture can suggest, but are yet aimless, restless and vacuous, and although with a passion for confessional outpourings of their own sen- timents and impulses, are essentially without self-knowledge, self-reverence, or self-control. The best elements of noble womanhood are present in profusion, but the faculties which control, unify, and direct them are elements which unfold later and now are either undeveloped or are decaying from overripeness, so that some of these are as dis- tinctly cases of arrested development as if commissures or association fibers failed to appear to knit the brain regions together, so that this organ acts as it were in spots, and without that harmony, moderation, and balance which is a distinguishing trait of psychic maturity. In others, impulsiveness, fickleness, vacillation, a passion for intensity and superlatives in word and deed, reactions, perhaps from too prolonged repression, have already begun the work of psychic disintegration, and only a touch of hysteria and a little more self-coddling are needed to make these lives a burden, even to those whom love may make uncon- scious that they are so.
These two opposite instincts, which we may dub oiko- tropic and oikofugic, between which the soul oscillates espe- cially in youth, suggest again atavistic psychic stratifications, and also a once earlier pubescence. The infant impulse to fol- low or to be off may be a survival of an age when primitive clans were on the move and the gregarious instincts of the child were expressed in toddling after the mother as tribes moved about seeking food or flying from enemies before a ses- sile status was reached. The prepubescent reductives of this instinct may stand for the evolution of permanent habitation, and the rise of the curve again in or before the first teens sug- gests a past age of earlier tropical independence. But of all SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 383 this we know as yet too little to speculate. Certain it is that some years before parenthood is now normal all statistics on the subject show a marked decrease of scoliotropism, when docility to teachers and studies ends. While many homes are not attractive enough and some are too much so, the school, if it is the panacea for all individual and social ills and the con- dition of higher development we deem it, is sadly lacking in meeting the needs and interests of this transition age.
VI. School and teachers versus home and parents. In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging environment. Almost the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt obedience. Our very presence enforces one general law — that of keeping our good- will and avoiding our displeasure. They respect all we smile at or even notice, and grow to it like the plant toward the light. Their early lies are often saying what they think will please. At bottom, the most restless child admires and loves those who save him from too great fluctuations by coercion, provided the means be rightly chosen and the ascendency ex- tend over heart and mind. But the time comes when parents are often shocked at the lack of respect suddenly shown by the child. They have ceased to* be the highest ideals. The period of habituating morality and making it habitual is ceas- ing and the passion to realize freedom, to act on personal ex- perience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. To act occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal motives develops the impulse and the joy of pure obli- gation, and thus brings some new and original force into the world and makes habitual guidance by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer constraint, the practical rule of life. To bring the richest streams of thought to bear in inter- preting the ethical instincts, so that the youth shall cease to live in a moral interregnum, is the real goal of self-knowl- edge. This is true education of the will and prepares the way for love of overcoming obstacles of difficulty, perhaps even of conflict. This impulse is often the secret of obstinacy.1 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE And yet, " at no time in life will a human being respond so heartily if treated by older and wiser people as if they were equals or even superiors. The attempt to treat a child at adolescence as you would treat an inferior is instantly fatal to good discipline." 1 Parents still think of their offspring as mere children, and tighten the rein when they should loosen it. Many young people feel that they have the best of homes and yet that they will go crazy if they must remain in them. If the training of earlier years has been good, guidance by command may now safely give way to that by ideals, which are sure to be heroic. The one unpardonable thing for the adoles- cent is dulness, stupidity, lack of life, interest, and enthusiasm in school or teachers, and, perhaps above all, too great strin- gency. Least of all at this stage can the curriculum or school be an ossuary. The child must now be taken into the family councils and find the parents interested in all that interests him. Where this is not done, we have the conditions for the interesting cases of so many youth, who now begin to suspect that father, mother, or both, are not their true parents. Not only is there interest in rapidly widening associations with coevals, but a new lust to push on and up to maturity. One marked trait now is to seek friends and companions older than themselves, or, next to this, to seek those younger. This is in marked contrast with previous years, when they seek asso- ciates of their own age. Possibly the merciless teasing in- stinct, which culminates about the same time, may have some influence, but certain it is that now interest is transpolarized up and down the age scale. One reason is the new hunger for information, not only concerning reproduction, but a vast variety of other matters, so that there is often an attitude of silent begging for knowledge. In answer to Lancaster's 2 questions on this subject, some sought older associates be- cause they could learn more from them, found them better or more steadfast friends, craved sympathy and found most of it from older and perhaps married people. Some were more interested in their parents' conversation with other adults than i The Adolescent at Home and in School, by E. G. Lancaster. Proc. of the •The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Ped. Sem., July, 1897, vol.
SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 385 with themselves, and were particularly entertained by the chance of hearing things they had no business to. There is often a feeling that adults do not realize this new need of friendship with them and show want of sympathy almost brutal.
Stableton,1 who has made interesting notes on individual boys entering the adolescent period, emphasizes the importance of sympathy, appreciation, and respect in dealing with this age. They must now be talked to as equals, and in this way their habits of industry and even their dangerous love affairs can be controlled. He says " there is no more important question before the teaching fraternity to-day than how to deal justly and successfully with boys at this time of life. This is the age when they drop out of school " in far too large numbers, and he thinks that the small percentage of male graduates from our high schools is due to " the inability of the average grammar grade or high-school teacher to deal rightly with boys in this critical period of their school life." Mos't teachers " know all their bad points, but fail to discover their good ones." The fine disciplinarian, the mechanical movement of whose school is so admirable and who does not realize the new need of liberty or how loose-jointed, mentally and physically, all are at this age, should be supplanted by one who can look into the heart and by a glance make the boy feel that he or she is his friend. " The weakest work in our schools is the handling of boys entering the adolescent period of life, and there is no greater blessing that can come to a boy at this age, when he does not understand himself, than a good strong teacher that understands him, has faith in him, and will day by day lead him till he can walk alone."