mentality and the main current of evolution swerved thought- ward. Moreover, the proportionate growth of the different parts and organs of both body and soul which had been lost for five or six years is being restored in a new unity on the higher plane of adult life not again to be upset. Cohesions that were loosened are being recompacted and new associa- tions of all the just acquired feelings, impulses, and ideals are being knit into individual character and personality. Thus this age is again more or less liminal, but in a new way which it would be premature to attempt to fully define, yet which is pretty clear in some of its larger lineaments. It suggests another slight pause for wider orientation, leveling up arrears, developing, in Bal four's phrase, a mental framework, and rounding out symmetrically, ensuring the full benefit of every advantageous factor of heredity, acquiring self-knowledge and perfecting self-control, perhaps, above all, seeking an en- vironment most favorable for ensuring and utilizing to its uttermost the last upward push of physical growth, which is so very easily lost, and for nursing every new-born spontaneity of the soul, so liable to be aborted or perverted. For the chosen few who can do this, vocations must not be too insistent nor outer exactions too rigorous, but the pressure of both should remit a little and there should be leisure enough to allow natural tastes and aptitudes to be heard from, and the vision should range wide enough to include as many lines of endeavor as possible, that every form of ability and inclination may either find or strike out a new way with the least loss from misfits, because with the wrong choice of life the strongest fail, while on the right course the weakest often succeed.
If this diagnosis is right, the college, to fit it, should stand for extensive more than for intensive study. Its noble tradi- tions of liberal training suggest something analogous to the nuptial flight of many species of insects before they lay off their wings and begin their life work. It implies knowing something of everything more than everything of something. It is not the place for specialization or technology.
The college should address itself chiefly to the ages of from eighteen or nineteen to twenty-one or twenty-two, for the age of legal majority bears many external, if not internal, signs of being also nodal. It should not insist on inserting itself be- INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 529 tween the secondary school and the university, but stand a little aside with doors hospitably open to those who have time to pause for it on the road to a profession, or to spend a period of culture and acquire an avocation before entering a career, and also to earnest young men who have not yet acquired the tools of learning and still need topics that belong to the dis- ciplinary stage, and who would make up arrears. To all these its doors should open on easy terms. It can hardly exclude even gilded youth who would spend this period of lull and physiological incubation in a profitable, social, and insti- tutional atmosphere. Entrance standards should admit all who are in a stage of development to profit more by its grade of work than by a lower. To these ends poll and honor work should both have a place and be duly distinguished. Social opportunities should be many and open, and numbers should not be so large that* the faculty are not freely accessible to all. The latter should set examples of simple and morally ex- emplary lives, and everything should be pervaded by ethical influences, for these years are in some respects the hardest of all the trying, probationary period between puberty and nubility. The peculiar nature and needs of just this stage of life should be studied by every method now available, and its essentially transitional character understood and adjustment made to it, for it is only provisional and preliminary to ma- turity. Especially at this age many need to broaden by retard- ing, and some even to be mere amateurs and loiterers, who will get more from academic life as a school of human nature than from courses. In a sense not true of specialized education later, everything is propaedeutic and preparatory, hence culture is here more process than result.
While no one can predict what they will become, it is not so hard to sketch briefly and in large outlines what colleges should be if they are to fit the needs of youth, although our knowledge of the latter is still too meager for any finalities. They should first, in my opinion, renounce all acuminated specialization and let teaching have its perfect work. This lofty art should culminate here, and to this professors should completely subordinate all their university aspirations. On the other hand, the grinding schoolmaster, the lesson -setter, and recitation-hearer, with his daily marks, should be repressed, 53° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and the teacher should teach, demonstrate, address his efforts more to the upper and less to the lower half of his class, forage widely and incessantly, and bring everything within reach in his field to them. Every good illustration from popular science, charts, diagrams, curves, tabulations, apparatus, and the full resources of the library should be turned on, the lecture method purged of its admitted limitations, made the most of, being conversational and designed to provoke reaction by fre- quent personal questions, even repetitions or discussions on the spot, if necessary to insure complete conveyance, trans- lations, and perhaps readings by the instructor in class, and every zest-provoking device should be in his repertory of re- sources. He should teach every topic broadly and comprehen- sively, and instead of disparaging mere information, it should ooze from his every pore. Instead of the affectation of mi- nute and exhaustive detail, he should brave the charge of su- perficiality, and even just this should sometimes be the muse he invokes, because in many topics it is the natural and psycho- logical beginning, if not sometimes the end, and hints, glimpses, and suggestions are often more in order than ex- haustiveness. Mental awakening should be his goal, and he should inspire to read for pleasure, for the only real measure of culture is the number and kinds of things done for the love of them. The stock of knowledge is to-day so vastly enlarged and growing at such an unprecedented rate that new occasions should teach him new and larger duties than can be found in any academic precedents. Frontier questions galore should be raised that can not be answered. Answers should be few and problems many, for the reverse practise stunts by a sense of finality. The ideal college teacher will go to the limits of his knowledge and let these be plainly seen, for this is one of the strongest provocations to the student to attempt to go farther. The test of success here is the number of interests and the intensity of curiosity aroused far more than the size of the body of knowledge laid away in the memory. The breaking down of prejudices, religious, political, philosophical, literary, social, and the postponement of discipleship to any school or view in every field where there are many held by intelligent and sincere men, should result in all-sided sympa- thetic appreciation which should have free course before the INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 531 spirit of criticism, which is often the foible or forte of the feeble.
The American college in fact is very different from this; indeed, the president of Columbia declares that it " hardly ex- ists nowadays." While trying to subordinate the high school it has been led into a yet sadder captivity by lapsing, as if by a nemesis, to be itself only a " link," if not a hybrid, between the grades below and those above. The younger generation of professors are experts inspired by ideals of a highly specialized culture which should not dominate here. The uni- versitized college is encroached on from below till Presidents White, Harper, Butler, and others, would abandon the first one or two years, while the senior year is often given over to the professional school. If the older and larger colleges were not so firmly entrenched in the devotion of their graduates whose very self-respect as well as filial piety would suffer if their Alma Mater came to grief, if they were not rich and independent exactly in proportion to their wealth, if they lacked the association of age, the buildings and equipment that only years can bring, if they were not so wrought into our his- tory and habits of thought, and were stripped of the prestige of the A. B. degree, in none of which the essentials of education consist, but were new fiat institutions otherwise just as they now are, it is painful to think what their status and prospects would be.
(G) A few years ago I gathered and printed a list of two or three hundred text-books on philosophical subjects that have been used in American colleges, and more than a score of which I have used myself.1 In nearly all of the eighteen colleges of the country in 1880, and in most since founded, these have been the culminating subjects of the A. B. course taught the last year or two, and commonly by the president, around whom everything centered. In some of their many forms these studies of man's nature are the fitting close of an education that is truly liberal, and they still constitute perhaps the most marked difference between the college and the tech- nical school. From 1642, when the Harvard degree required 1 The History of American College Text-Books and Teaching in Logic, Ethics, Psychology, and Allied Subjects, with List of Texts. Proc. Am. Antiq. Soc., 1894, vol. ix, pp. 137-174. See also a series of five articles in the Forum, 1900.
532 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE a synopsis of logic, this the oldest of these topics has also been the most persistent. It was the organon of law and theology. Disputations were at first weekly, and interest cen- tered in fallacies and syllogistic reason, and the rules of de- duction were the norms of all thinking, divine as well as hu- man. It was the culmination of the higher education and the only recognized method of investigation. This met a real need of youth. The charm of personal encounter and rejoinder and colloquy ever since the sophists and the forensics of the school- men needs rules. Logic presided over rhetoric and oratory, taught to deal with categories and intellectual species, and from its forms of predication grammar was first evolved. Later came the revival cult conveniently marked by the arrival of Whitefield, in 1740, as described in Chapter XIV. In the stress of youthful emotion a supernal cult is necessary, for to regard duties as divine commands appeals to the subrational parts of the soul now dominant. It teaches respect for duty, and avoids all the hypersubtleties of speculative ethics which volatilize moral sanction. The third movement was the introduction of ethics by President Clapp, of Yale, in 1755, and later the establishment of the Alford chair at Harvard in 1789. Although morals was theological, " virtue is not by nature but by divine gift," it encountered great opposition, for works could not save men, and this prejudice was greatly increased when deists attacked the clergy in the name of ethics and natural religion. Goodness was likeness to God, his will its warrant, and impenitence and unbelief were among the chief sins. It was established, however, by the aid of the Unitarian movement and the Declaration of Independence, which turned men's thoughts to political virtues. The transition from the view that morality was a code revealed in Scripture, to the idea that it was seated in innate intuition in the soul of man, progressed for two centuries. Dreary as Clarke, Shaftesbury, Cudworth, Hutchinson, Beattie, Mackintosh, and even Paley, now seem, they humanized ethics. The fourth cult dates from 1714, when a copy of the first edition of Locke's Essay was given to Yale, two years before Jonathan Edwards entered as a lad of thirteen. This he read with a joy such as "the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold," and at the age of seventeen drew Berkeley's conclusion INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 533 without having read him. It was long before this line of thought, which Hume and Kant completed, was installed in American colleges. This tedious detour was short-circuited by the Scotch school, which non-suited the whole question of reality of the external world, self, and God, etc., by an imme- diate appeal to common sense. Under Porter, McCosh, and others this view was represented in many texts and courses and was maintained as an amiable if not fructifying modus Vivendi with religion, science, ethics, and the new psychology, and gave to education its most prevalent philosophic basis. It was only after the history of philosophy had been tried and found unsettling, " teaching students to hold no opinions on any subject really vital," that the reality cult really began its remarkable academic development. This at first seems hard to account for in our practical land; but it is here, as in the days of the sophists and Abelard, explained by the environ- ment.
Youth has a passion for callow ratiocination. The fee of Enathlus, the lying Cretans, the syllogismus crocodilus, the heterozetic fallacy, the Brundisian ass, Cratylus seeing and not seeing at the same time with one eye shut, delight the junior sophistes. The dialectic fledgling's forensic passion to subject all things to proof and to cross-examine is sometimes so strong that it lapses to verbal quibbles that would do credit to Euthydemus or Hudibras, for youth easily almost comes to feel, as Plato said, that a dissatisfied pig is better than a satis- fied man. He is becoming conscious of associative activities hitherto latent, and loves to propound and maintain theses of his own. Reason is just coming to seem a universal solvent, and he would everywhere substitute the mediate for the im- mediate, and subordinate intuition to understanding, as if he faintly anticipated Fichte's ideal state with no habit or instinct, but wherein knowledge and consciousness, with the world's purpose fully revealed, ruled all in a community of free beings. The tender intellect sometimes crepitates and grows dizzy in the orgy and flux and loses its orientation and may waste powers in unifying the irreconcilable, in elaborating distinc- tions that have no existence, or giving the best arguments to the worst cause, and a kind of reasoning mania is easily possible.
534 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE When rationalistic parents and teachers ask me when they should cease to command and when begin to explain common grounds of morality, I am almost tempted to the extravagance of replying that there are things for which no reason should be given till the youth is strongest and can whip his elders, for these theories seem invented by senescent parents to make the weakness of old age respected after physical strength is no longer able to compel the right, and argument is sometimes a poor and cheap "substitute for respect to personal authority.
Again, the very isolation of student life weakens the sense of reality. Not only has touch, its mother, given place to the eye with which Berkeley could juggle when men became eye- minded, but within academic walls a still further remove is effected and youth grow bookish and assume that all wisdom can come by reading or by theory, and that all things can be learned in the library or imparted by teaching. Apprenticeship means appropriating the ready-made material of culture. His receptive powers are long" overworked amidst a mass of products far higher than youth can ever hope to create, and thus the carrying activities are loaded in a way that stimu- lates emotional susceptibility, and he is cloyed with little opportunity for reaction or efferent drainage. As the body of learning increases and tutelage taxes all his powers to under- stand, he grows flaccid, limp, servile to authorities, and prone to take things in a bookish way. His activity is imitative and examinations prevent the normal abinnt stadia in mores. With overdocility comes proneness to accept heteronomous stand- ards and to parasitic objectivism toward a knowledge that is acquired but not assimilated. All his mental possessions, there- fore, are a little like snow not yet melted and absorbed by the soil, and his soul seems to herd ghosts. All this is increased directly in proportion to the length of the status pnpilaris and the rapidly growing size of the body of culture-material to be acquired. Again the life of the professor is still more perma- nently withdrawn from the world and, anthropologically, we are all hypertrophied in intellect and anemic in will. As salaried, too, we are removed from the hot palpitating struggle for existence and the intense life of feeling and passion that surges about us. Hence, like the isolated Hindus of old, we dream when we wake and wonder if the world exists and if INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 535 reality is really real. We grow bulbous-headed and over- cephalized and teach alien and not indigenous living systems, and our hypertrophied self-consciousness falters and is not sure of even itself. \We have been so long so warm in our hospi- tality to all kinds of thoughts by others that the proprium of our individuality has been submerged, and at best we only sort, classify, and present alien ideas. Thus we incline to involute when we should evolute ourselves. t\ It is under such conditions that the modern morbus academi- cus of ultra epistemology has taken root and flourished. Berkeley's ephebic paradox was suggested by theological questionings in the vainJ but since too common, endeavor to parallel the spiritual and the material world, which in fact rest on bases so distinct that even analogies between them are danger signals. Hume showed the absurdity of, and Kant, with German seriousness, brought the wisdom of age to bear to correct, this seductive extravasation of the. speculative passion of the youthful Irish genius. Should youth suffer this disenchantment, and is this an essential part of a truly aca- demic training in this field? Should they agonize with prob- lems that only age can solve, and that but imperfectly and with infinite intrication, or is it a handicap? While cloistered youth easily take infection with the bane, is it possible to so administer the cure as to make it effective within a year or two so that the subject of it shall be well and immune enough to do his work in life with no diminution of impulsion? All this I utterly disbelieve and hold that the loss far exceeds the gain, that the destruction of mental and moral tissue by the negation which any philosophaster can cause, can not be made good by any pedagogic art yet known to man, and that the process is precocious for youth, if not what history will regard, whenever it has been taken seriously, as an aberration of the adult in- tellect. The process may be roughly characterized as follows: I. The solipsistic hopo is one of the strangest pot-holes in the roaring, eddying currents of human thought. It is at- tractive to the same class of mildly paranoiac minds that of old muddled themselves with Zeno's paradoxes. The spirit that always denies and that applies rigorously the Cartesian prin- ciple of doubting to the uttermost, finds that his mind does not strip well. Reduced from a state of buoyant confidence to an 536 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ignorance that seems hopeless, denuded of every vestige of his earlier beliefs, his mental eyeballs seared by the sight of this hell of adolescence, nature seems deflowered of its freshness and bloom, and whole-souled devotion to any of the objective sciences is thenceforth impossible. This experience, it must be admitted, is often a strange exhilarant for thought and poetic and metaphysical expression. There is a quaint and moving pathos about those who have ever really stood, or even affected to stand, in this Ultima Thide of self-involution. Formerly the ecstatic worked himself up to the seventh heaven and lost the earth in the contemplation of God and super- essential being. His modern congener is lost to all else in the contemplation of his own inner states. The latter alone are real and true, and if he ever acquires any other knowledge or belief, it must be laboriously manufactured out of this mother lye of experience. He is reduced back not to the condition of primitive thinkers before all we call culture existed, but to a hypothetical mesh of weltering, amoeboid, psychic rudiments from which he must evolute himself. Many literary novelties impossible before are now easy. Do these psychic states, in themselves utterly unconnected, drift together in shoals by chance, or are they bundled up into personalities by bodily or brain sequences on which we must rely for everything causal? What a vast and almost megalo-maniacal respect for them- selves human aggregations of atomic mind-states acquire, when it is realized that the whole vast cosmos, even space itself, is essentially and really created by and projected from them as caryatides, bearers of the universe! \\ How plastic everything, even natural and moral law, seems! There are as many possible cosmoses as there are combinations and per- mutations among all these its elements, and how far above the old delusion of any absolute truth, duty, law, etc., we have ascended! How supreme over its base creation, matter, mind becomes! How near the divine creative energy is each think- ing subject! How dull the souls that labor with matter as if it were ultimate, or with human opinion as if it could be taken seriously! fa This state of mind stimulates brilliancy and paradox be- cause everything is an open question and the other side of every problem is perhaps true. It goes with a special proclivity INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 537 for insoluble questions instead of for those that may be re- solved. A vital soul thus flayed knows no rest till it can at least cicatrize. Most who have been thus suddenly out of their depth and had to swim for their lives or sink, have felt utterly lost in this charmed circle of agnosticism and instinctively seek some " urposition " or residuum incombustible in the hottest fire of skepticism. Some lose heart at the exhortation to drop all tradition, custom, inclination, instinct, and feeling, at an age when these latter are at their best, despair of building up again the world they have lost out of its acosmic elements, and commit suicide because they can not endure the pangs of an ingrowing intellect, or with a baffled sense of failure turn aside to some practical calling. Others shoot the chutes by a salto mortale into some saturated orthodoxy, for the mind now is like a chemical element in the nascent stage, ready to com- bine with substance^ with which it ordinarily has little affinity, or they may accept some professor's private patent way out of agnosticism. The religious " ways out " are manifold, but all postulate an analogy between a belief in an external world and that in God, soul, and perhaps other theological and meta-