physical concepts, which are made unwarrantably close, if in- deed they exist at all. A pleasant pathway of ascent through Wundt's theory of attention and Fichte's conception of will has a profitable historic background and leads in sight of some rich laboratory material, but it implicates what God made plain, requires a struggle for psychic existence that is too intense for many, and is essentially sophronistic. Those who win out and achieve full epistemological salvation become adepts, with a certain aloofness. The sense of reality the vulgar have and the things they strive for are hardly worth while, and even though they follow after them, an unique, residual indifference is felt. They deal in reasons good or otherwise for what healthy souls believe by instinct, because a life unexplained is no longer worth living and no act can be virtuous if not based on knowledge. All must be done in or by or go through consciousness, and there is eternal warfare against all that is naive. So their minds are rily at the bottom and frothy at the top. Just as dogmatic assertion tends to paralyze the sense of veracity, so to work out by reason what nature gives by instinct both weakens and teaches distrust of the best things 78 538 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE in the soul. The world rings a little hollow, the logical char- acter of the universe is a subject of anxiety, and occasionally the gnostic soul falls a prey to the night terrors of the baffled ontologists. Initiates slowly adjust themselves to an altitude so high that there is danger of mental asphyxia, where the view is vast but nothing can be clearly seen for distance and haze. Although physically they frequent the haunts of men, they are really Mahatmas living in remote places and prodigies of pre- mature and extreme senescent wisdom.
Now, this treatment of the adolescent mind is wrong be- cause it turns the soul inward at a stage which nature designed to be most objective. It needs an atmosphere that has not lost its full proportion of oxygen. It is psychically starved when hunger and assimilative powers are at their maximum. An impoverished diet makes for cephalization, but prevents the final molt. Those who know the true Georgics of the mind devote themselves to positive work and leave the negative processes of decay to care for themselves. I 'At this age the powers of the soul are measured by the capacity to believe rather than to doubt. How much real knowledge the mind can absorb to its saturation point, and not how little, is the criterion. \pur problem as teachers is how to conserve all the freshness of life now nearing its culminating point, and not how the sad wisdom of years can be affected in the earliest twenties. Volo, or sentio ergo sum, or sum ergo cogito is now better than cogito ergo sum; the natural thinking is better than treating consciousness, like a St. Martin's stomach, by pulling out and examining its contents to study the stages of assimi- lation. The old riddling on the categories, the raucous, idle proclamation of what knowledge truly is, debate whether we can really know and what is the essential nature of mind, the disposition to hold up the work of science till the spurious mortgage, which the theory of knowledge affects to hold, is canceled, should now yield to the view that whatever nature is, we are, that it is the truth of all things, and what does not agree with it is by every token false. Truth is now profitable- ness, and the purest philosophy is that which applies most im- mediately to the problems of right living. It is thinking the universe in the easiest and most effective, and not in the hard- est and most abstract way.
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 539 Probably Aristotle had such cases in mind when he in- sisted that no young man should be allowed to study the high- est philosophy, and so doubtless did Plato, who would flog youth who continued this study too long. When the instinct of ratiocination buds and the callow youth loves to play with arguments, he should have his fling and be inducted into the largest problems in the history of philosophy, but the pang of it all should at this age be in a benign, homeopathic form. Plato allowed the citizens of his ideal state to return to it at the age of fifty, after they had been duly seasoned in the world. Everything we know of the stages of life indicates that serious and prolonged study of such problems has its place, but it is in maturity and old age. Perhaps we may grant that a little more of it has been justifiable here to free the mind from dog- matic fetters than in ages and among races where the youth- ful mind has been less wound about by the cerements of religious orthodoxy. But just as long after the doctrine of total depravity had been mitigated, religious cults insisted upon a very radical re-creation of life; so after the late dangers of hide-binding creeds have abated, philosophers continue their exorcisms of natural thinking, even the errors of which are far more harmless than their methods imply, while many of them still regard healthy common sense a little as clergymen once regarded the natural man.
II. This is not the place to state my own philosophy, which I reserve for another work. Every system bases on certain postulates believed by the author to have peculiar advantages for grasping more of the complex modern world of thought and fact with greater mental ease and certainty and in better order than any other and securing most moral effectiveness. But while their scientific exposition belongs elsewhere, the pedagogic value of certain fundamentals for college adoles- cents seems to me so great and indisputable that, with power to do so, I might be almost capable of enforcing my orthodoxy here against all heretics by methods condemned by modern ideas of the freedom of individual thought. So lost are we to all genetic perspective in education, and particularly in this department of it, in opening everything intellectual to every- body, with no reference to stages of development or grades of ability, that it is high time to remember that youth have a 540 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE certain non possuinus that it is dangerous to longer ignore. The articles of this creed may be roughly and dogmatically stated as follows: ( i ) There is one infinite background or tabula of the uni- verse— the most objective and ineluctable of all the data of consciousness — and that is space, or sheer, pure extensity, which seems infinite and which is a perfect continuum. To try to think it away, to make it at root subjective, a mental projection or mere form of sensory, is fatuous, and has been a product of speculation which has involved endless waste of effort and confusion of thought. God, soul, thought, every- thing that truly is, is somewhere, although we can neither locate it nor define its form. All that exists, or ever has or can, must be present somewhere, in room, in certain directions from us, and this absolute space must be received as a universal, logical postulate, and as a genetic prius to all vigorous logical thought". It is common three dimensional space subject to Euclidean laws throughout. It makes motion possible; it is simple, undecomposable, unaffected by any content, uniform throughout, permeable alike in all directions, and one in a sense true of nothing else. No thing or thought is so neces- sary. Every negation, if complete, ends in its affirmation. It is certainty. It is perhaps the only object which can neither be transcended nor thought away. It is so immediate and presuppositionless that it is beyond proof, non-relative, and un- conditioned. Anything so aboriginal can, of course, never be adequately stated or described, because language is only a tool by which we handle its content. It is a merely verbal logic that either identifies it with nothing or denies it, merely be- cause blank nothing can not be said to exist. Even though it be a special kind of nothing — a nihil privativwn — it is not sub- stantialized by the subtle connotations of the predicate of the substantive verb to be, when we say it is. It is also the principle of negation and the purest nothingness conceivable. Were there naught else, it might be full of light or dark, and neither thought nor words could distinguish one from the other. Con- ceived as the fathomless Abgrund or abyss, it has not even direction and nothing to orient by, while its infinity has been intoxicating, and not only Oriental and ancient Greek, but Western thought, from Bruno and Eckhart down, has reveled INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 54 1 in the monstrousness of it all. Everything must submit then to the category of space, which takes precedence over that of being. Nothing is real that has no position or that is confined to an absolutely mathematical point. Thus deity, sentiments, ideas, and force are either mere abracadabra or word-stuff, or else they exist somewhere in this most extensive and least intensive of objects. This, then, is the first article of a new creed in which science and religion can now unite: I believe in space. The most disastrous modern sin against it has been Kant's fallacy of subjectifying it, when in fact nothing is so indifferent to the very existence of man and his little mind as space. If it is not real and objective in the sense above described, nothing is or can be so. That we are in space is perhaps the most a priori and native of all deliverances of the soul as well as its most axiomatic. We are in space in a larger and earlier sense than that in which space is in us. To deny the void was an early heresy, and this proton pseudon of modern epistemology is a decadence akin to the fatal hubris which Greek tragedy makes the gods condemn in those who try to think thoughts not suitable to man's estate. No proof can strengthen a healthy mind's belief in it. For the ingenuous student to doubt is to mortgage his life-work with a contract he can never absolve, which will. make everything else seem a little less real. Modern efforts to analyze the space radical are aberrations of our day which have involved great and wasteful strain.
(2) So abstract a tabula will not stay rasa, and thought so abhors a vacuum that it persistently gives it color, form, conceives it as perhaps arched, laminated, granular, and so forth. This may help the mind to welcome the conception of ether, which etymologically suggests an all-encompassing empyrean fire. For Hippocrates this was continuous with air, and grew subtle and charged with immortality, as we ascend mountains, where man is literally inspired by breathing in the same atmosphere which the gods inhale. When imponderable gases were discovered, thoughts of ether faded. In the seventeenth century, however, many ethers less metaphysical than that of Descartes were conceived for planets to swim in as media, and as vehicles for magnetic influences or sensations, until in the eighteenth they had been multiplied like scholastic 542 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE entities and the mind revolted against them. But Newton needed ether to explain gravity, and Huyghens, as a light- bearer, and modern magnetism demands it, so that now it ap- pears to have a secure place as the largest of all objects we know, containing the whole visible universe, not perhaps infi- nite, but the least material of all that exists, known only to mind and not sense, far less dense than the radical solar nebula which Lockyer makes 1/200,000,000 as tenuous as hydrogen. Indeed so frictionless is it that it can not transform molar mo- tion into heat or be heated itself, so that density and inertia lose their meaning when applied to it. It is non-atomic, structure- less, homogeneous, and so continuous that were it ever so mag- nified it would show no pores. It dissolves and absorbs nothing, is isotropic with no distinction of direction. It is non- magnetic, non-luminous, non-gravitative, and non-material. While it is so tenuous that it can not be defined, it can main- tain immense stresses going through it in all directions without interference. Perhaps atoms are vortexes in or other transformations of it, and all physical and vital energy comes from and is ultimately resolvable into it. Although without temperature, weight, or other property, it is a reservoir of vastly more energy than has yet appeared, so that new uni- verses may erupt from it almost anywhere. Thus it is the source and destiny of all things, a kind of omnipresent, super- nal substance or natura non naturata, which, although its prop- erties are still unharmonized, satisfies man's long quest for nou- menal, ontologic, and purely metaphysical reality. The Vedas, Parmenides, Hegel, Spinoza, Jonathan Edwards, would have found here the pleroma or fulness of being which they sought. It fits every philosophical definition of substance or ultimate reality that is valid. Every distinction between Sein and Nicht- sein describes its relations to infinite space. It meets all the ontological arguments for the being of God. It makes the soul happier and more at home because it is so much more positive and nearer to life than vacuous space. It is a new plenum that fills the world of thought, because the universe seems charged to its maximal with a being compared to which all that the senses can know is relative, defective, and unreal.
Paulsen suggests that the perhaps 22,000 million stars which it is conjectured a forty-inch telescope can see are cells in the INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 543 brain of a divine Autos, but all that is here maintained is that the modern concept of ether gives the mind a satisfaction that is deep and profoundly more religious than vacuity. It is existent to a degree that our puny theories dream not of. It makes philosophical nihilism henceforth impossible, so that the second article of our new creed is: I believe in being or ether. (3) The world as the senses know it is essentially dy- namic. All life and perhaps all forms of existence follow the law of the conservation of energy. Dynamism largely takes the place of materialism in modern physics and chemistry. There is probably no dead or inert matter. Though perhaps all the force we know was developed from ether, it appears to be a fixed and unchanging quantity under this law, so that now none is lost or created. It appears also that the greatest quantum of force possible in such a world as we know exists either latent or patent. Perhaps matter itself is an eddy hover- ing or floating in these great tides, an accident, it may be, of temperature. Vortexes are stored with apparently inexhausti- ble energy. Suns and worlds, conjecturally at least, a million times larger than our sun hurtle through space, some of them perhaps several hundred miles per second, and when they collide they are resolved into some unknown but apparently ultra- gaseous state by the heat evolved. Planetary paths may be the tracks of selective movements, countless impacts, accord- ing to Pruss, having eliminated all orbits not fitted to survive. The potencies of many and perhaps more worlds than now exist are hovering diffused in the great sea of ether and will shape themselves from out the void in time? for time is motion. Practical science consists largely in diverting tiny rills of force and making it serve man's purpose; the rills are lamps by which we study some of its great tides. This dynamic view of the physical universe brings it still nearer to man. He must for- ever interpret force in terms of will, and is even prone to postu- late a nisus or effort behind it. Both animism and philosophy show this inveterate instinct. Not only this, but man often delights to consider himself as a pillar of dust thrown up by an eddy or whirlwind of cosmic forces, and to feel that in the end he will be resolved back into their play when the kinesis he has diverted shall turn again to its original home, and he will sink back like a cloud, the spindrift of a passing wave or a 544 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE bubble, into the wide sea. From such concepts, imperfectly grasped before the day of modern science, theology formed its ideas of omnipotence as an attribute of the divine. If the force in the universe can be made to take any direction it can accomplish anything that has ever entered into the mind of man to conceive and vastly more. The world energy knows no fatigue. Its flux makes change the law of life. It takes all the Protean forms, man and perhaps mind being one, and then all are changed like vestments and something we call higher or lower takes their place. It sometimes seems too vast to have any law at all as if our science were concerned only with its small rivulets, or where its momentum was nearly spent, and as if it were all a postulate or fiction for man's self- deception; but to grasp the great thought that everything is dynamic brings the divine to a higher potence still nearer man, so that if we can add to our creed a third article — I believe in energy — we thus in some sense humanize the world and approach still nearer to the divine with augmented com- placency.
(4) Experience with and reflection on the phenomena of nature, the organization of society, and especially modern science, have brought law into the world, so that the play of forces is not mere cosmic weather. There is now no Miltonic chaos, no tohu vabohu, no chance, no limbo, where anything can happen with no sequence. The great epochs when man discovered the rotation of the earth about the sun, and gravity, brought the phenomena of physics and chemistry under exact law, slowly developed all the tables of constants, detected the evolution of worlds, chemical elements, geologic strata, the as- cending orders of life, integration and disintegration, and was able to control conditions with absolute certainty that results would then follow; these have convinced us that even where we do not know it the universe is lawful to the very core. This feeling Helmholtz makes the heart of even esthetic pleasure. Science, set like a great and growing island in the middle of a stormy, foggy sea, is the most precious achievement of the race thus far. It has made nature speak to man with the voice of God, has given man prevision so that he knows what to expect in the world, has eliminated shock, and, above all, has made the world a uni-verse coherent and consistent through- INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 545 out, not the prey of caprice and supermundane beings, and not the victim of the conflict of good and evil powers in the world, but a great whole with a logical character, working in every part, could we but know it, with the exactness and regularity of a machine. Thus, from the inadequate stand- point of a mechanical view of the universe, man is further con- soled, as if eternal arms were beneath him, and not merely the unknown but the intrinsic character and nature of the world is thus made so akin to his own reason that he can grasp it with increasing objective truth. All sequence involves a cause, and thus we feel still more at home in our world and can affirm with fulness of heart almost in direct proportion to our knowledge of science that we believe in reason, law, and cause in the universe.
(5) The mechanical view, although, as Lotze urged, always present, is always subordinate, at least in our present state of knowledge. The mysterious spirit of life hovers over it and is ever evolving a higher order of existence. Many biologists have shown its exuberance which leaves no possi- bility unexhausted for plants or animals. Creatures adapt themselves with marvelous plasticity to inhospitable and changing environments. They migrate, hibernate, haestivate. If one per cent of one per cent of the 6,000,000 eggs of the cod matured, in less than 100 years all the seas would be packed like a pork-barrel with cod. Each year we are told 3,000 million million menhaden visit the coast of North America. Averaging five estimates, each herring, of the countless shoals that rove the sea, lays 27,800 eggs per year. A recent writer calculates that if all the human beings in the world were fed to all the forms of animal existence in the sea and on the land, our race would last them but a few seconds. If the careful balance of life with its cruel law, eat or be eaten, is disturbed, rabbits swarm in Australia, locusts destroy the crops in vast areas, microbes sweep away the race in pestilences. Various writers have estimated the number of animal species in the past and present as from 900,000 to 100,000,000. Life so abounds that it sometimes seems to our fancy almost as if it threatened to make the whole inanimate universe over into vital forms of life, as Pryor conceives it was in the beginning, and that all inanimate existence is secondary and derived from 546 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE decadent life. Not only that, but in the struggle for survival everything seems impelled upward and onward to higher and fuller life with which we all wish to tingle and glow. To be sure, we can not now develop dead to living things by abio- genesis, but the world of life seems utterly inexhaustible and inconceivable. It is as if everything, in the terms of Schelling's philosophy, struggles up to blossom into life.
This, then, is another of the great affirmations which make themselves irresistibly felt in the modern soul. We hunger for the maximum of life. We want it in all its depth and breadth, now and forever. The thought of extinction of life is horrific. At the very top of the organic series, the most complex of all tissues, we have the brain, the most intricate chemically and morphologically, with its several thousand million cells and fibers, with its wondrous power of using up the energies that flow to it from the blood, the mouthpiece of the absolute in the world, through which all revelations have and must come, and which is the apparatus through which we apprehend nature. Thus with an ever fuller conviction the man truly instructed in science must affirm his faith in life abounding as a yet higher law of the world.
(6) Nothing so reenforces optimism as evolution. It is the best, or at any rate not the worst, that survive. Develop- ment is upward, creative, and not de-creative. From cosmic gas onward there is progress, advancement, and improvement. Even the most arrant systems of pessimism place absolute pain in atomic disintegration at the beginning and perhaps at the end of things, and regard organization as amelioration of agony even if it never yields a surplus of pleasure. For the normal individual, animal or man, the very will to live and the competitive struggle for life indicates excess of enjoyment over pain. In his present mundane life, man rarely has need of falling back on Stuart Mill's convention that a little pleasure at long intervals outweighs ages of floods of pain. Statistics show that the average length of human life is slowly increasing. Modern hygiene makes what vital capital we in- herit more effective and prevents the ravages of the great joy- killer, disease. Again, though in early infancy there are more tears than smiles, growth itself, to say nothing of culture, is marked by a steadily widening field of pleasure. Pain tends INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION 547 toward extinction and pleasure measures the abundance of life. Few men have suffered such fear of death as the arch-misera- bilist, Schopenhauer, who could taste real joy only in the fleet- ing contemplation of works of art embodying Platonic ideals. Nature's vis mcdicatriv that heals wounds, expels disease, brings the balm of comfort in sorrow, and the recurrence of spring which awakes beauty in the world and love in the heart of everything that lives; all these make for optimism. Hence, to-day more than ever, as we see in every field that retrogression and hard times are relative and transient and that every prin- ciple of growth is benign, the conviction is borne in upon the soul, consciously, and perhaps more unconsciously, that there is something like good-will or beneficence at the root of things; that man is a favored, protected, and chosen being, whose supremacy in nature is not an accident; that there is a power that makes for his u,nfoldment and welfare as if it were inter- ested in or friendly to him; and thus he feels more at home in the place nature has prepared for him and more disposed to trust that all that is beyond his ken is well; that real evil can not befall the good men, living or dead; and that he can afford