(b) The same is true of defectives, criminals, and the in- sane. There is the same lack of motivation and lukewarm interest. Every truly inductive psychologist values above price the few minute clinical and other personal studies of individual cases which show devolutional phenomena, and feels that he is helped on to know more of the stages by which man became man and of the difficulties, and therefore dangers, of the ascent still seen in adolescence. I know of but one or two American universities in which a course in morbid psychology and clin- ical work is part of the regular work of the department, and although it is correlated with neurological work, even this is confessedly inadequate. Our sophistic psychologists rarely regard this work with contempt, and most of them not with entire indifference, but so intent are they in their quest of the Holy Grail of reality, or of the golden fleece of categories and moral sanctions, that they neglect it unless it serves the pur- pose of literary impressionism, illustration, or disputation.
(r) Animal psychology, or mind in the animal world, is now happily less often an object of animosity or disparage- FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 53 ment. Descartes found that the implications in this field were irreconcilable with his speculative system, and so non-suited even the higher animals as non-intelligent and even senseless automatisms, who did not really feel pain; despite the re- cent revival of interest in a scientific as distinct from a specu- lative treatment of the study of instinct, not only is his ques- tion often treated seriously in texts and in class-rooms, but it is incessantly reenforced by the sophistic argument that, as we can not really know other mind's or matter, we can much less know the animal world, so that idealism not only makes no contribution to this field, but disheartens those it interests from attempting it. In this way, too, it countenances extreme views of tropism like those of Loeb, and of mechanism like Bethe, who says ants and bees have no interests for the psychologist. Great as was the value of the triumph of the views of Marshall Hall over those of Whytt, and of Pfluger over those who held to a spinal soul,1 mechanism, although always present, can just as much, but no more, completely explain animal than human conduct, and to eliminate sentiency and all analogies to human life is only a grimace or affectation of science; this, as Forel and others have shown, greatly limits both its scope and effi- ciency, and is as extreme in one direction as the almost totemic overestimation of animal sagacity by Jacobi, Fechner, and others. Anthropomorphism here has a very important func- tion, as well as limitation, both of which theorizers are so prone to magnify.
The higher animals feel pleasure and pain and have many algedonic experiences in common with us. They have our five senses, memory, and attention, and most of our forms of reflex action. They sleep, wake, feel hunger and thirst, form food- societies, and much of their activity, like man's, is to satisfy their wants. They have sexual sensations and desires, many forms of courtship and showing off, sex-calls, songs, feel rivalry and jealousy, and fight. They make homes often very elaborate; shelter, defend, and feed their young. Fear is a prominent factor in their conduct, as is anger and rage. They have esthetic appreciation and preferences for color, form, and 1 See my Sketch of the History of Reflex Action, and its continuation by Dr. Hodge. Am. Jour, of Psy., vol. iii, pp. 71, 149.
54 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE action. They play, form families, associate in flocks, swarms, coveys, packs, and droves, and often have highly developed social organizations and classes, with communal sympathies. Some kill the weak, make slaves, have great power of imitation, make toilets, are educable, etc. They are liable to many of the same diseases as we, have parasites, often suffer various forms of insanity and degeneration,1 and have many of the symptoms of old age. Some species are great collectors, and others cas- trate their superfluous males. They migrate, organize, forage, rob, hunt, take captives, feign death, and distract enemies that are on their tracks.
Many animals do many things that man can not. They have better homing instincts, estivate, hibernate, horripilate, breed faster, have far keener and probably other senses, excel us in speed, strength, and agility, and have ways of knowing direction and the weather; they weave, felt, plaster, make many products, and conform to many conditions of life unfavorable for man.
Of the many differences between the animal and the human mind, the use and creation of tools and of clothes, the invention of language, association by similarity, conscience and morality, religion, progress, etc., have been urged, but those most familiar with the brute mind and the recent literature upon it, while they best know that the superiority of man in these respects is very great, will be least disposed to deny to animals at least faint rudiments in all these respects. There is then no absolute, but only quantitative, differentiation. A late comparative psychol- ogist boldly figured out the ratio of 50—28 as marking the rela- tive psychic powers of lower races of men and higher animals respectively.
(d) The same, in changed terms, is true of childhood and youth, the value of the study of which I hope this book shows.
With all four of the above tendencies, a psychology that refuses to evict common sense both in the popular sense and in that of the Scotch philosophy which short-circuits the Kantian detour; that would regard the chief writers, from Descartes 1 See the instructive and too little known volume of Pierquin: Traite" de la Folie des Animaux. Paris, 1839.
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 55 to Hegel, as a philosophic intermezzo, which, while full of ex- hilaration and rich in lessons, replete with interest and instruc- tion, is not essential for its purposes, save as a precious human document and warning; that seeks a pure culture of naturalism and induction; that believes that neither the world nor the soul is lost, and that nature and mind have the same root; that holds that mind is invisible nature even though nature be not verified by empirical methods as visible mind; that puts custom above law and convention, and instinct, feeling, and impulse above both; that is not a cave of the winds, a hybrid of metaphysics and science; that will be neither bastardized nor marooned by morosophs who would limit its scope and affect disappointment in its work either in the laboratory or with animals or children, because it does not solve their scholastic problems — assuredly makes some havoc.. Psychic is even more upsetting than bio- logical evolution, for it lies nearer to all human and practical interests. But it renders instant aid in education, science, and religion. It turns with profound interest to the past of the soul, is not concerned chiefly with the future, and studies its embodied rather than its disembodied life. Its cardinal principle is nemo psychologus nisi biologns, so inseparable are life and mind. It sees remarkable parallels between the present state of the disciplines that now deal with mind and soul and those which dealt with life just before Darwin, and anticipates from its work a similar period of debate, followed by an analo- gous new life in all these branches in the near future. As phys- ical nature could hardly be really taught before the develop- ment hypothesis, so psychic natures now so misrepresented can not be properly taught, or will at least then be far more effec- tively taught, and not only without the present mental wreck- age, but with vast moral and intellectual economies. It prefers a long program of hard work yet to be done to a sense of com- placency in any present finalities. It appeals to the really young, and would appreciate and meet adolescent' needs rather than deal in sad insights which belong only to senescence, whether normal or precocious. It believes youth the golden age of life, the child the consummate flower of creation, and most of all things worthy of love, reverence, and study. It regards educa- tion as man's chief problem, and the home, school, state, and church valuable exactly in proportion as they serve it. When it 56 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE finds the order of nature in teaching lost, often inverted, growth arrested, the all-sided expansion it should bring restricted, it realizes that even pure science, including those departments that deal with mind, is not for its own sake, but that it becomes pure precisely as it becomes useful in bringing a race to ever more complete maturity.1 1 Some have urged that every parent knows childhood and youth by instinct; but the soul is surely as complex as the body or its diseases, which no parent as such pretends to understand. Others insist that the genetic study of childhood is a popular and non-academic movement; and so it is, both for good and for evil, the first, because it rebases our department on broader foundations and makes us feel again the magnetic thrill of touching life and the perennial concerns of parent- hood; interests the public in research in a vital, practical way that has already yielded many benefits and promises far more; develops a momentum of new humanistic interest in the reminiscent that will shape and vivify the academic work of the future; and the last, because its evils are those incident to lusty infancy, and only growth can give it ever better methods and increased facilities. It was as in- dispensable, as in the day of the Reformation, to go outside the narrow limits ot over- sublimated systems to appeal to fresh, original sources in the F0/>£-soul and face the dangers of followers where zeal was too untempered by knowledge in the faith already rapidly justifying itself that these would be soon left behind as rigorous methods developed. Others have objected that results were crude masses of facts unsystematized, uninterpreted, unreasoned, and this was in part true and in- evitable at an early stage of such a movement, for it was a new ore and the method of refinement hard to learn, but the foundations of a great structure are already laid in some parts and in others well begun, into which this material will be built, not, of course, without waste aud some refuse. One eminent psychologist declared to a large audience, with great applause, that his children should be loved and never studied, for it was an injurious interference with nature. But is love less or greater if made intelligent, and may, nay, ought, we not to study in order to best serve and develop our children, and is not half our lesson to let alone and trust nature more and to keep them in this paradise of unconsciousness? Others say the adult mind is the psychologist's only Bible and oracle, for in it the human plant blossoms; but very much is lost in infancy that never comes to maturity, and these factors are often vital for life, training, and science. Moreover, this argument would rule out embryology and find everything needed in adult anatomy. As was said of evolution, no one who has studied psy- chogenesis carefully and candidly has been unconvinced by it, if they have not crossed the dead line of age. In our land and period of decreasing offspring, it has made children more desired; it has given a new fruitful topic to thousands of culture clubs of men, and especially of women; it has found a fulcrum and placed its lever under our educational system and an era of transformation has already begun; it has already shed new light on the origin and development of language, myth, and more yet of religion; and is now rapidly establishing itself in academic life and work. The new danger that now looms in the pathway is that too much will be expected of it too soon. Finally, some of these objections involve views of childhood as false to fact and as atrocious scientifically as was the Calvinistic doc- trine of total and innate infant depravity, morally and religiously.
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 57 Back of all the determined facts of proportionate physical growth in the average boy or girl, so rich, as we have seen, already in the quality of suggestiveness (the best of all indi- cations of a great future development of a subject) lies a mass of nascent questions like the dim baby faces artists depict in the background of the nativity as a cloud of witnesses who are to people the earth in the future. How wide is the range of individual differences in the temporal order in which parts ap- pear and what are the facts and laws of heterochrony; what influences cause the slow secular transpositions now going on in the race and individuals; why are females virified and males feminized in their gerontic stages as the secondary qualities of each were latent in the other but were suppressed during the reproductive period; what are the psychic units and subunits of variation each under the control of its own hypothetical determinant; how shalljwe conceive the central principle which, despite the struggle of part against part for its food supply from the blood, preserves such harmony that the development or arrest of each also acts as a stimulus to the development or arrest of others, so that, while the elements vary so independently, their growth is still so well correlated, coordinated, and subordinated with each other? Such problems can not be answered till we can compare, far more fully than we are now able to do, on a far broader basis of fact, with less diverse methods and less uncertain and contradictory results, growth of all the larger parts like those indicated in Chapters I and II, with the embryological and infantile changes in each rudimen- tary organ, especially of all the animal forms in man's pedigree, and also, as I believe, till we have a parallel embryology of the psyche, now just beginning its yet more significant develop- ment. The soul is as much, but no more, an organized unity than the body; reflects the growth not of the brain alone, but of every part and organ; has powers in every stage of nascency and decadence like it; is now hindered and now forwarded by every advance and regress of every organ, as organs themselves are, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, always according to the fulness or scantiness of the tides of life. Both mind and body have the same haunting and persistent prob- lems concerning the relations of innateness and heredity versus environment and individual experience. Pubertv is not with- 43 5 8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE out analogues to birth and teething. In each of these three crises new structures come to the front. In adolescence, individuation is suddenly augmented and begins to sense its limits and its gradual subordination to the race which the Fates prescribe. Each of these epochs is no whit less significant for the evolution of the soul in ways we must now labor to discover and delineate. It is no less profoundly sexed than the body. Its nature is no more absolute and un- changeable. It, too, is a mobilized and moving equilibrium. Much once central is now lapsed, submerged, instinctive, or even reflex, and much once latent and budding is now potent and in the focus of consciousness for our multiplex, com- pounded and recompounded personality. It is real progress in this direction that psychology has found a new center in the will, served by a motor apparatus that is seventy-two per cent of the body weight; that we have just begun to peep beneath the threshold of consciousness, like toilers that have just real- ized that there is a mine of untold wealth beneath their factory which makes it and all its output of comparatively small value, full, as some still deem the subconscious, of ghosts and shades of the departed.
Especially in the study of sentiments and feelings to which experimental psychology is now tending and regarding as its next step, are the results of this Cartesian neglect of lower soul- types, paralleled by Herbart's degrading concept of feeling as the friction and detritus of mutually impinging ideas and of excessive introspection now apparent in the paucity or aridity of literature almost proverbial among students of childhood and adolescence. Are all forms of pain identical, or are there many pains; is pain a sensation itself or a form of sensation; is there a neutral state between pleasure and pain; are there pure states of feeling devoid of intellectual elements; is the Lange- James theory right or wrong — these are surds insolv- able by any conceivable crucial test. These problems isolate us in barren formulae, but charm disputative, literary, speculative minds, make parties, attract the scholastic temper, but repel the investigator who is chiefly drawn to problems that in the present state of knowledge admit rather than preclude solu- tions. We seek nothing less than to raise new problems, find different methods of approach, and bring about a transvaluation FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 59 generally, and we hold that on many of the points in the older regime of the soul, our simple data, even though often crude and meager, dispraised by the studio psychologists as merely descriptive, inductive, or observational, are better data than all the books, ancient or contemporary, contain. They upset many theories and definitions, but have all the promise and potency of cumulative facts and fresh problems, and suggest morning, and not evening, of finished work.
There are other more general difficulties, now apparent, which beset the specific study of our emotional nature. First, in our day and civilization, the hot life of feeling is remote and decadent. Culture represses, and intellect saps the root. The very word passion is becoming obsolete in psychological litera- ture, which on this subject elementarizes, repeats, is pedantic, or affectedly didactic. The life of feeling has its prime in youth, and we are prematurely old and too often senile in heart. What does the psychologist of the study know of hate that makes men mad or bestial, of love that is not only uncalculating but is stronger than life, of fear that shakes the pulses, and courage that faces death in its cruelest forms unflinchingly, of the wager of battle where men fight beasts or each other with teeth and knives and spitting revolvers, of torture, of joy that threatens sanity? Our sensibilities are refined, but our per- spective is narrow, our experiences serene and regular, we are protected, our very philosophy as well as our religion sup- presses and looks with some contempt even upon enthusiasm in matters of the cold reason. We have experienced no soul- quaking reconstruction of our souls like Paul, Augustine, or Luther, we are anemic and more prone to deny than to believe, to speculate than to do, and we turn to novels and the theater for catharsis of our emotions. Our sentiments are oversub- tilized and sophisticated and reduced to puny reactions to music and appreciation of art that are nine parts criticism and one part appreciation. What we have felt is second-hand, bookish, shop-worn, and the heart is parched and bankrupt. We can hardly keep alive even the hearty and frank jealousies, aver- sions, and sympathies of our own divergent psychologic theo- ries, as if our deeper soul felt their inanity, and so the stagna- tion that healthful controversies and polemics prevent, slowly supervenes.
60 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Happily for our craft, the child and youth appear at the truly psychological moment, freighted, as they are, body and soul, with reminiscences of what we were so fast losing. They are abandoned to joy, grief, passion, fear, and rage. They are bashful, show off, weep, laugh, desire, are curious, eager, re- gret, and swell with passion, not knowing that these last two are especially outlawed by our guild. There is color in their souls, brilliant, livid, loud. Their hearts are yet young, fresh, and in the golden age. Despite our lessening fecundity, our over-schooling, "city-fication/' and spoiling, the affectations we instil and the repressions we practise, they r.re still the light and hope of the world especially to us, who would know more of the soul of man and would penetrate to its deeper strata and study its origins.
Back of them, too, lies the great animal world, where often each species seems essentially but a feeling-instinct embodied, as the carnivora's cruelty, the rabbit's timidity, or the peacock's ostentation. A true science of character that goes beyond eye, ear, and motor mindedness, or activity and passivity, can not dispense with the deeper,' older, and more fixed unary or binary or at most ternary compounds that were matured and compacted before man arose. In the new tentatives in ethology also, it is already apparent that true types of char- acter can be determined only by studying the animal world; that man, e.g., inherits some of the aggressiveness of the car- nivora and the timidity and deceit of creatures long preyed upon. Indeed, each animal group may represent some one quality in great excess, the high selective value of which made possible the development and survival of a species, genus, or group. It should not be forgotten that such psychological classification of psychic types may cross-section morphological divisions of species and genera. Each character type is thus a fulfilled possibility of development in some specific direction, and in man is based on unconscious, instinctive, prehuman, or animal traits, the elements of which are combined into aggregates of greater or less cohesion according to age or persistence in time, etc. This, of course, must be supplemented, first, by a quite independent study of the forms of degeneration; and, sec- ondly, of the marked traits and dispositions in norms 1 persons; and when the conclusions from all three classes of data concur, FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 6 1 we may infer that we have a trait of more or less typical value. Individual psychology differs thus from comparative psychol- ogy chiefly in the fact that the former is concerned with slighter and more delicate variations, man's mode of adaptation being finer and more specific. These general considerations, to be treated more fully elsewhere, are here adverted to only to explain the general psychonomic law which assumes that we are influenced in our deeper, more temperamental dispositions by the life-habits and codes of conduct of we know not what unnumbered hosts of ancestors, which like a cloud of witnesses are present throughout our lives, and that our souls are echo- chambers in which their whispers reverberate.
Assuming thus that the feeling-instincts of whatever name are the psychophores or bearers of mental heredity in us, some of which persist below the threshold of consciousness through- out our lives, while others are made over as instincts or are transformed to habits into directions of the will more or less persistent, we thus cross-section old methods and can approach this study with a mental horizon vastly widened and with an historic sense less atrophied. We have to deal with the arche- ology of mind, with zones or strata which precede consciousness as we know it, compared to which even it, and especially cult- ured intellect, is an upstart novelty, with everywhere a fuller and clearer expression of a part of the soul, but always partial, one-sided, and more accidental and precarious. Both the degree and the direction of development of intellect vary more with age, sex, environment, etc., and sharpen individuality, while the instinct-feelings in each person are broader, deeper, and more nearly comprehensive of the traits of the whole human race. It is in the latter alone that man is a microcosm, com- prising anything like the large totality of human experience, so that for it, and not for conscious mind, it can be said that nothing human or prehuman is alien. These radicals of man's psychic life, while some of them are decadent, rudimentary, and superseded, are often important just in proportion to the depth of the phylogenetic strata into which they strike their roots. Hunger, love, pride, and many other instinctive feel- ings, to say nothing of pleasure and pain, can be traced far down through the scale of vertebrate and to invertebrate life.
It is plain, for these reasons, that they must be studied 62 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE