From the answers of 1,068 boys and 1,268 girls from seven to six- teen on the kind of chum they liked best,2 it appears that with the teens children are more anxious for chums that can keep secrets and dress neatly, and there is an increased number who are liked for qualities that supplement rather than duplicate those of the chooser. " There is an apparent struggle between the real actual self and the ideal self; a pretty strong desire to have a chum that embodies the traits youth most desire but which they are conscious of lacking." The strong like the weak; those full of fun the serious; the timid the bold; the small the large; etc. Only children 3 illustrate differing effects of isolation, while " mashes " and " crushes " and ultra-cronyism with " selfishness for two " show the results of abnormal restriction of the irradiation of the social instinct which should now occur.4 M. H. Small,5 after pointing out that communal are more intelligent than animals with solitary habits, and that to even name all the irradia- tions of the social instinct would be to write a history of the human race, studied nearly five hundred cases of eminent men who developed proclivities to solitude. It is interesting to observe in how many of these cases this was developed in adolescence when, with the horror 1 Ueber Einzel- und Gesammtleistung des Schulkindes. Arch. f. d. Gesammte 2 Development of the Social Consciousness of Children, by Will S. Monroe. North- Western Mo., September, 1898, vol. ix, p. 31.
8 Bohannon: The Only Child in a Family. Fed. Sem., April, 1898, vol. v, p. 475. 4S. Delitsch: Schulfreundschaften, Kinder Fehlen, Bd. v, p. 150. 5 On Some Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Ped. Sem., April, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of mediocrity, comes introspection, apathy, irresolution, and subjectiv- ism. The grounds of repulsion from society at this age may be disap- pointed hunger for praise, wounded vanity, the reaction from over- assertion, or the nursings of some high ideals, as it is slowly realized that in society the individual can not be absolute. The motives to self- isolation may be because youth feels its lack of physical or moral force to compete with men, or they may be due to the failure of others to concede to the exactions of inordinate egotism and are directly pro- portional to the impulse to magnify self, or to the remoteness of com- mon social interests from immediate personal desire or need, and in- versely as the number and range of interests seen to be common and the clearness with which social relations are realized. While maturity of character needs some solitude, too much dwarfs it, and more or less of the same paralysis of association follows which is described in the nostalgia of arctic journeys, deserts, being lost in the jungle, solitary confinement, and in the interesting stories of feral men.1 In some of these cases the mind is saved from entire stultification by pets, imagi- nary companions, tasks, etc. Normally " the tendency to solitude at adolescence indicates not fulness but want," and a judicious balance between rest and work, pursuit of favorite lines, genuine sympathy, and wise companionship will generally normalize the social relation.
X. First forms of spontaneous social organisations. Gulick 2 has studied the propensity of boys from thirteen on to consort in gangs, do " dawsies " and stumps, get into scrapes together, and fight and suffer for one another. The manners and cus- toms of the gang are to build shanties or " hunkies," hunt with sling shots, build fires before huts in the woods, cook their squirrels and other game, play Indian, build tree-platforms, where they smoke or troop about some leader, who may have an old revolver. They find or excavate caves, or perhaps roof them over; the barn is a blockhouse or a battle-ship. In the early teens boys begin to use frozen snowballs or put pebbles in them, or perhaps have stone-fights between gangs than which no contiguous African tribes could be more hostile. They become toughs and tantalize policemen and peddlers; " lick " every enemy or even stranger found alone on their grounds; often smash windows; begin to use sticks and brass knuckles in their fights; pelt each other with green apples; carry shillalahs, or perhaps air-rifles. The more plucky ar- 1 A. Rauber: Homo Sapiens Ferus. 1888. See also my Social Aspects of Education; Fed. Sem., March, 1902. Also Krapotkin: Mutual Aid. London, 1902. * Studies of Adolescence. Classified Facts.
SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 397 range fights beforehand; rifle unoccupied houses; set ambushes for gangs with which they are at feud; perhaps have secrets and initiations where new boys are triced up by the legs and butted against trees and rocks. When painted for their Indian fights, they may grow so excited as to perhaps rush into the water or into the school-room yelling; mimic the violence of strikes; kindle dangerous bonfires; pelt policemen, and shout vile nicknames.
The spontaneous tendency to develop social and political organizations among boys in pubescent years was well seen in a school near Baltimore in the midst of an eight-hundred-acre farm richly diversified with swamp and forest and abounding with birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc. Soon after the opening of this school l the boys gathered nuts in parties. When a tree was reached which others had shaken, an unwritten law soon required those who wished to shake it further to first pile up all nuts under the tree, while those who failed to do so were universally regarded as dishonest and every boy's hand was against them. To pile them involved much labor, so that the second party usually sought fresh trees, and partial shak- ing practically gave possession of all the fruits on a tree. They took birds' eggs freely, and whenever a bird was found in build- ing, or if a squirrel's hole was discovered, the finder tacked his name on the tree and thereby confirmed his ownership, as he did if he placed a box in which a nest was built. The ticket must not blow off, and the right at first lasted only one season. In the rabbit-land every trap that was set preempted ground for a fixed number of yards about it. Some grasping boys soon made many traps and set them all over a valuable district, so that the common land fell into a few hands. Traps were left out all winter and simply set the next spring. All these rights finally came into the ownership of two or three boys, who slowly acquired the right and bequeathed their claims to others for a consideration, when they left school. The monopolists often had a large surplus of rabbits which they bartered for " butters," the unit being the ounce of daily allowance. These could be represented by tickets transferred, 1 Rudimentary Society among Boys, by John Johnson, Jr. Overland, Mo., October, 1883.'
398 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE so that debts were paid with " butters " that had never been seen. An agrarian party arose and demanded a redistribution of land from the monopolists, as Sir Henry Maine shows often happened in the old village community. Legislation and ju- dicial procedure were developed and quarrels settled by arbi- tration, ordeal, and wager, and punishment by bumping often followed the decision of the boy folkmote. Scales of prices for commodities in " butters " or in pie-currency were evolved, so that we here have an almost entirely spontaneous but amazingly rapid recapitulation of the social development of the race by these boys.
From a study of 1,166 children's organizations described as a language lesson in school composition, Mr. Sheldon 1 ar- rives at some interesting results. American children tend strongly to institutional activities, only about thirty per cent of all not having belonged to some such organization. Imita- tion plays a very important role, and girls take far more kindly than boys to societies organized by adults for their benefit. They are also more governed by adult and altruistic motives in forming their organizations, while boys are nearer to primitive man. Before ten comes the period of free spon- taneous imitation of every form of adult institution. The child reproduces sympathetically miniature copies of the life around him. On a farm, his play is raking, threshing, building barns, or on the seashore he makes ships and harbors. In general, he plays family, store, church, and chooses officers simply be- cause adults do. The feeling of caste, almost absent in the young, culminates about ten and declines thereafter. From ten to fourteen, however, associations assume a new char- acter; boys especially cease to imitate adult organizations and tend to form social units characteristic of lower stages of hu- man evolution — pirates, robbers, soldiers, lodges, and other savage reversionary combinations, where the strongest and boldest is the leader. They build huts, wear feathers and tomahawks as badges, carry knives and toy-pistols, make raids and sell the loot. Cowards alone, together they fear nothing. Their imagination is perhaps inflamed by flash literature and 1 The Institutional Activities of American Children. Am. Jour, of Psy., July, SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 399 "penny-dreadfuls." Such associations often break out in de- cadent country communities where, with fewer and feebler offspring, lax notions of family discipline prevail and hood- lumism is the direct result of the passing of the rod. These barbaric societies have their place and give vigor, but if un- reduced later, as in many unsettled portions of this country, a semisavage state of society results. At twelve the predatory function is normally subordinated, and if it is not it becomes dangerous, because the members are no longer satisfied with mere play, but are stronger and abler to do harm, and the spice of danger and its fascination may issue in crime. Athleticism is now the form into which these wilder instincts can be best transmuted, and where they find harmless and even whole- some vent. Another change early in adolescence is the in- creased number of social, literary, and even philanthropic or- ganizations and institutions for mutual help — perhaps against vice, for having a good time, or to hold picnics and parties. Altruism now begins to make itself felt as a motive.
XL Student life and organisations. Student life is per- haps the best of all fields, unworked though it is, for studying the natural history of adolescence. Its modern record is over eight hundred years old and it is marked with the signatures of every age, yet has essential features that do not vary. Cloister and garrison rules have never been enforced even in the hospice, bursa, inn, " house," " hall," or dormitory, and in loco parentis practises are impossible, especially with large numbers. The very word school means leisure, and in a world of toil and moil suggests paradise. Some have urged that elite youth, exempt from the struggle to live and left to the freedom of their own inclinations, might serve as a biological and ethnic compass to point out the goal of human destiny. But the spontaneous expressions of this best age and condi- tion of life, with no other occupation than their own develop- ment, have shown reversions as often as progress. The rupture of home ties stimulates every wider vicarious expression of the social instinct. Each taste and trait can find congenial companionship in others and thus be stimulated to more in- tensity and self-consciousness. Very much that has been hitherto repressed in the adolescent soul is now reenforced 400 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE by association and may become excessive and even aggressive. While many of the race-correlates of childhood are lost, those of this stage are more accessible in savage and subsavage life. Freedom is the native air and vital breath of student life. The sense of personal liberty is absolutely indispensable for moral maturity, and just as truth can not be found without the possi- bility of error, so the posse non peccare precedes the non posse peccare, and professors must make a broad application of the rule abusus non tollit usum. The student must have much free- dom to be lazy, make his own minor morals, vent his disre- spect for what he can see no use in, be among strangers to act himself out and form a personality of his own, be baptized with the revolutionary and skeptical spirit, and go to extremes at the age when excesses teach wisdom with amazing rapidity, if he is to become a true knight of the spirit and his own master. Ziegler 1 frankly told German students that about one-tenth of them would be morally lost in this process, but insisted that on the whole more good was done than by re- straint, for, he said, youth is now in the stage of Schiller's bell when it was molten metal.
Of all safeguards I believe a rightly cultivated sense of honor is the most effective at this age. Sadly as the unwritten code of student honor in all lands needs revision, and partial, freaky, and utterly perverted, tainted and cowardly as it often is, it really means what Kant expressed in the sublime pre- cept, " Thou canst because thou oughtest." Fichte said that Faidheit, Feigheit, and Falschkeit were the three dishonorable things for students. If they would study the history and enter into the spirit of their own fraternities, they would often have keener and broader ideas of honor to which they are happily so sensitive. If professors made it always a point of honor to confess and never to conceal the limitation of their knowledge, would scorn all pretense of it, place credit for originality frankly where it belongs, teach no creeds they do not pro- foundly believe, or topics in which they are not interested, and withhold nothing from those who want the truth, they could from this vantage with more effect bring students to feel that the laziness, that while outwardly conforming does no real 1 Der Deutsche Student am Ende des 19. Jahrunderts. Stuttgart, 1895.
SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 4O1 inner work, that getting a diploma, as a professor lately said, an average student could do on one hour's study a day, living beyond one's means, and thus imposing a hardship on parents greater than the talent of the sons justifies, accepting stipends not needed, especially to the deprivation of those more needy, using dishonest ways of securing rank in studies or positions, on teams, or social standing, are, one and all, not only ungen- tlemanly but cowardly and mean, and the axe would be laid at the root of the tree. Honor should impel students to go nowhere where they conceal their college, their fraternity, or even their name, to keep themselves immaculate from all con- tact with that class of women which, Ziegler states, brought twenty-five per cent of the students of the University of Berlin in a single year to physicians, to remember that other's sisters are as cherished as their own, to avoid those sins against confiding innocence which cry for vengeance, as did Valentine against Faust, and which strengthen the hate of social classes and make mothers and sisters seem tedious because low ideas of womanhood have been implanted, which give a taste for mucky authors that reek with suggestiveness, and to avoid the waste of nerve substance and nerve weakness in ways which Ibsen and Tolstoi have described. These things are the darkest blot on the honor of youth.
Next to this comes inebriation. A well-known German student song says he who has never been drunk is not a brave man. Plato seems almost to counsel occasional inebriation be- cause it removes reserves, reveals the whole soul, and because conviviality makes men confidential, as men have sometimes deliberated at night when drunk and decided in the morning when sober. It is often said that intoxication a few times to find one's limit is a part of self-knowledge; that drinking together tends to idealize life, because it is a symbol of the spiritual. It is somewhat akin to the overflowing joy of youth which makes us glow with life, but, on the other hand, very few drink to make themselves bold, to overcome pessimism, or are inspired by any muse thereby. If total abstinence seem a little too clerical, ascetic, or an undue restriction of academic freedom, certain it is that excess weakens all the zest and interest of life and makes the drinker more and more unin- teresting. Strong drinks burn out the finer joys of life, if 402 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE they do not actually consume the substance of the neurones and injure the elasticity of the blood-vessels. Stronger lights kill weaker ones, and the exaltation of wine in excess makes in- tellectual pleasures seem dim and pallid.
The years of academic life are like a high table-land or a mountain ridge which we cross in passing from infancy to old age. At each point on it we can see and feel both ways — protensively toward the future and retrotensively toward the past — as at no other stage of life. Childish memories and feelings will soon become pallid, unreal, desiccated things for memory, preserved as useless rudiments and consisting only in a few chance images, or quite lost to view. Before this, all adult life has seemed remote and unreal, but now the soul is Janus-faced, looking before and after in a very peculiar sense. Thus we may understand another new principle, which I propose, viz., that of range and mobility up and down the genetic ladder peculiar to this age. It is never so easy to sink far below the normal or average common sense, intelligence, or effort, to abject silliness, but these moods alternate with the most strenuous and lofty aspirations toward the highest. Collegians often seem to find distinct relief from the hardest and most intellectual activity in a degree of banality that would defy belief save among the circle of intimate friends who had actually seen it. Perhaps those whose wisdom is veined with the most prelusions of senescence are those who can be most babyish. Some serious young men seem born old and very early lose the power, if they ever had it, to be or feel young, while others remain all their lives conserved youth, if not children. This power of free and ready movement up and down the Jacob's ladder of phylogeny I believe to be a resource of very great economic value for achievement. This functional reversion enables us, at it were, to tap the freshness and re- sources of earlier years and prevents the ossification of each stage of the past, like death closing in upon us.
This, of course, may be excessive and savor of neurotic instability, but adults who can play renew the charm of youth and gather momen- tum for great efforts to attain higher levels. This elasticity is one trait in the psychology of genius. Play is essentially reversion, as we saw in Chapter III. Its charm consists in dropping back to older levels, in leaving the stress of the battle line at the front and dipping SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS into the experiences of earlier stages of life. Thus the overflowing animal spirits of young gentlemen with the first tender crop of beard, and with faces that suggest an owlish and Minerva wisdom, often, in songs, yells, or even in college journals, give vent to downright baby- ism, imitate infant talk and even forms of crying, parody spanking and putting to sleep with serio-comic nocturnes, ape the most silly and fatu- ous effusions of maternal tenderness, etc. Early boyhood is imitated, mocked and mimicked with great gusto by collegians. All the ways of the good and bad pupil at school and the Sunday-school scholar are the theme of many an extravaganza in game, college theatrical, etc. At Yale, seniors for many student generations have taken pleasure in reserving for themselves alone the right to play top, marbles, and hoop. The annual peanut " bum " at Yale, the molasses-candy society at Amherst, the hawkey-hurley club, are similar reservations. College songs often abound in animal noises, made-up words, parodies and caricatures of religion, bibulousness, society, the negro and Chinaman, medleys which Lotze so deplored in modern life, ultra-feminization and even impersonatioH in such detail of woman's ways and manners, every act of the coquette and even the allumeuse, that they suggest defective masculinity. Students lapse to interjectural speech, gibber- ish, mimic any dialect, brogue, defect and affectation of speech. The bathos of nonsense or " silly cures " that flourish like rank weeds in the mental acreage where professors strive to cultivate purity and precision of diction, suggest that the mind may love to revert thus to primitive chaos to find surcease from every constraint, even those of sense and sanity. These are often so saponaceously silly that the serious adult may be almost as much impelled to cry as to laugh. The wine of life is now most actively fermenting, depositing its lees, and evolving a higher spirituality.
Student social organizations, too, are often predatory, like those of street boys. Sheldon * describes a cave elaborately fitted up in a prominent college by a student society, with the beginnings of a kitchen-middens of bottles and chicken bones, the " ranters " of another old university who robbed hen and turkey roosts, and committed other kinds of theft, clubs de- voted to corn and watermelons and roast pigs, the collection of gates and other forms of pilfering. In one code a freshlSee his Student Life and Customs; New York, 1901, p. 366. A thesis for the degree of Ph. D. in Clark University, with a select and critical bibliography of forty-five pages. A work of great value and interest. See also Oskar Dolch: Geschichte des deutschen Studententhums; Leipzig, 1858, p. 300. Also the works of Lerber, E. David, Forel, and the Akademische Monatshefte. I. Theile; 1886, and 'following. See also my Student Customs; Proc. Am. Antiq. Soc., 404 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE man's room and even his trunk may be robbed of all valuables and only pipes, collars, neckties, and canes kept. Edibles of all sorts, whether a box from home or a class banquet, are the property of whoever can get them by strategy or force, while booty or plunder is sometimes preserved and handed down to classes or societies as tokens of prowess. Some of these societies are akin to the tribal system, others to the medieval guilds.
In striking and most significant contrast to the mobility of this age up and down the developmental stages, from in- fantilism to the highest adult aspiration, and even the affecta- tion of senescent wisdom, stands the opposite instinct of seg- mentation and intense consciousness and accentuation of the annual nodes of psychic evolution. This is seen in the way in which each class looks upon the next lower class as a pit from which he has been digged, and magnifies the really great advance which at this period the mere growth of a year in- volves. The sophomore has put off the freshman and all his works and ways. All this is richly illustrated in academic literature, sentiment, and custom. In Germany the Fuchs, brander Fuchs, junger Bursch, alter Bursch, bemooster Kopf, almost mark great epochs in human evolution. The Bejanus or yellow bill is a callow lout or hayseed who must be made over by upper classmen into a civilized being. The freshman must be salted, his greenness seasoned, his credulity and insouciance satirized, and perhaps his innocence deflowered. The roll of the ingenue and everything naive is never so contemptible as when self-consciousness is developing by leaps and bounds. The savage state of slavery long persisted in penalism and still survives in fagging. The fags were once branded, tattooed, beaten, sent on distant fake errands, must play or sing and help their masters home if drunk. All must run when any upper classman called and the last to arrive must do his bidding, while now each is assigned to a member of the upper form who protects him from alien imposition but requires certain services definitely prescribed by tradition, copying, serving breakfast, keeping accounts, etc.
Hazing, which literally means hamstringing, may be described as breaking in raw student recruits, teaching them respect and obedience. In the ancient universities of Paris and Bologna the newcomer was SOCIAL INSTINCTS AND INSTITUTIONS 4°5 described as a wild beast to be tamed or subjugated to the harness. He was dressed as a boar, his ears were clipped, his teeth filed, his hair or beard cut, or even singed. He was green grass to be cured, wood to be seasoned, unclean and in need of purification; he was scoured with soap and sand, and bodily mutilations, sometimes leaving scars for life, were occasionally inflicted. In early German universities, he must be passive and let others work their complete will upon him. He was made to eat dirt and grass, to drink from a shoe, and to make him drunk was a common diversion. In one old New England college the custom of parodying the " infare " still exists, and the new student is finally put to bed with a pumpkin nightcap. In another institution a similar custom still survives, with the variant that portions of his body are smeared with molasses. In the colonial college he was mulcted, and in one large institution still has to supply balls and bats for the upper classmen. In various others, certain articles of clothing are forcibly appropriated. The Yale freshman was elaborately tutored, the upper- class orator expatiated for his benefit in a mock heroic way first upon the dangers, second u]3on the honors of college life, and then came a program of physical treatment. Every one knows the current modes of smoking out, enforced speeches and songs, tossings in a blanket, isola- tion in remote places blindfolded, perhaps bound and gagged, etc., the suppression of which neither law, college discipline nor the disapproval of the academic sentiment of the overwhelming majority can effect.