objectively and by careful observational methods, and that the genetic psychologist, while he must use introspection in the old way, or reenforced and perfected by experimental methods wherever they serve his purpose, will find it necessary, almost in exact proportion as his work becomes fundamental, to gather his data empirically from the comparative study of lower forms of life and of children and from the collation of the varied inner and outer experiences of many minds besides his own. Thus the psychologist of the future, if his science is to have a future, must turn to the past, by which alone it can be judged, and if he would be prophetic and helpful must move more freely with a far larger command of data up and down the phyletic scale. Thus, too, our ideals of what the most perfect knowledge of any fact or object really is, are coming to be more and more genetic. We really know things only when we trace their de- velopment from the farthest beginning through all their stages to maximal maturity and decay. Thus we shall never truly know ourselves till we know the mind of animals, and most especially those in our line of descent. We must recognize that some of them are our superiors in certain respects; that while we explain them by explication of those traits wherein we excel, they no whit less explain us by those of their traits which are superior to ours and of which our souls contain only relics; that if in general we are their realized entelechy, they are the key by which alone we can unlock many of the mysteries of our own origin and nature.
Thus again the same revolution in the studies that deal with soul impends that von Baer and Darwin represented for the body. Before their day, everything was classification, nomen- clature, fixed species, just as with the pregenetic psychologists everything was faculties and processes, analyses and categories, as if the adult human mind, as we know it, were a fixed and settled thing. From the new standpoint, the human soul is one of many types of mind in the world. At best it may be a tran- sition from a lower to a higher race to be evolved later. It is perhaps a temporary and accidental form which force or life has taken on in the world. If it is like a species, a stage of evolu- tion, interrupted at a definite point, we can not truly know it until we have traced out all the roots and branches of the buried tree of its pedigree. We must study its changing phases histor- FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 63 ically. We can not know mind till we know minds. It is well not entirely to forget that in the great cosmic order revealed to the evolutionist, the mind, which modern analysts so care- fully dissect, may be merely a developmental stage of that of a higher type as much above us as we are above the dwellers in Lemuria; that sometime even it may be studied as a link be- tween the higher and the lower, and that it may itself some day become a missing one.
More summarily, then, the idea of soul we hold to is in its lower stages indistinguishable from that of life, and so far in a sense we revert to Aristotle in holding that any truly sci- entific psychology must be first of all biological. Mind is al- most, possibly quite, coextensive with life, at least animal life. Its most fundamental and primary expression may be characterized in Schopenhauer's phrase, the will to live. It can hardly be distinguished in rudimentary organisms from the nisus a tergo in its multiform manifestations which underlies growth, reproduction, and the struggle for survival generally. Soul is characterized by responses to the present environment that are exquisite, incessant, and all-sided, but is also pervaded by the more or less permanently registered traces of past re- sponses which lie far outside of and beyond our personal ex- perience. The first chapter of a scientific psychology, then, is metabolic and nutritive, and the first function of the soul is, as we saw in the last chapter, in food-getting, assimilation, and dissimilation. Whether it be conceived as spiritual or subtly natural, it is related to soft protoplasmic parts, somewhat as they are to the hard parts preserved and studied in paleontology- Just as s°ft parts are primary and shape hard parts, are more vital, plastic, and also more retentive of impression, so soul is related to body generally. Conceptions of idioplasm, psychoplasm, germplasm as distinct from somatic elements, help us on toward more adequate soul concepts. Mind and life are one and inseparable. Soul is thus at bottom homogeneous and also continuous throughout the animal kingdom, the chief differences being in degree and proportion. There are as many types of mind as of body, and vice versa, and we can truly know soul only through body, and conversely, can know body only through the soul. A brain without a mind is as impossible as a mind without a brain, every normal and pathological change 64 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE in either affecting the other. Whatever soul stuff may or may not be, it is most susceptible and responsive to all present influ- ences, and also, in a yet far deeper sense, most pervaded with reverberations from an immeasurable past. As Heraclitus says, " None can find the roots of soul, in such depths does it hide." Consciousness and personality are far later, modal, attributive, and specific determinations — irrelevant to a psyc/iologia prima.
From this it follows that much if not most soul is lost. With every extinct species of animal life a soul type also van- ished irrecoverably from the world, and as dead far outnumber living varieties, the great body of soul is irrecoverable by psy- chologists; thus the world of soul must remain fragmentary, and many faculties, traits, and genetic stages are gone forever. Man can with great difficulty form any conception of how the world appeared to the majority of even existing animal types; what their senses were and could do; what perceptive elements they were sensitized to; what their instincts and their organs were; how they reared their young, obtained their food, mated, fought their enemies, organized their societies, etc. Many of them are in our pedigree, and we inherit the stored results of this experience, but of how it was stored up we know little. It is hard enough for us to understand, after generations of study, what photodermatism means as a form of sense, or how the world looks through the ant's nose, hand or odor-contact or- gans, and how much more inaccessible the psychromes of van- ished genera.
It is just because we have thus come into possession of a vast and relatively sudden wealth, which we did not acquire, that the world often seems unreal to us and we try to validate it by strident and curious arguments which can never vicariate for the actual experiences we prate of, but which, vast as they were, must ever remain dim and unexplored, like a submerged continent once full of life, now only of buried secrets. Our own soul is full in all its parts of faint hints, rudimentary specters flitting for an instant at some moment of our indi- vidual life and then gone forever, dim and scarcely audible mur- murs of a great and prolonged life, hot, intense, richly dight with incident and detail that is no more; a slight automatism, perhaps, being the sole relic of the most central experiences of many generations, a fleeting fancy all that survives of ages FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 65 of toil and blood, a feeling that only peeps out for a moment in infancy, the far-off dying echo of what was once the voice of a great multitude. Yet these psychophores, whatever they are, are wax to receive and marble to retain. Thus soul is truly telepathic only to its own past, and thus these limitations are nearly every one of our remote psychic pedigree, or of the present, and never of a future state. The automatic or ancestral and the plastic and adaptive constantly interact and influence each other, the former predominating most in animals, but also profoundly influencing man. The former is somehow repre- sented in the lower, and the latter in the higher, brain levels, the sequence up the cord, medulla, basal ganglia, cerebellum be- ing a better picture of the real evolution of mind when we can read its meaning aright than the chambered nautilus gives us of its stages of growth.
Many of these archeopsychisms penetrate at times up to consciousness. They pass up over we know not how many thresholds and invade the adult mind. Even the soma itself is resonant in every cell, fiber, and reflex arc with these remi- niscences of extinct generations. Our souls are phyletic long before and far more than they are individual. Each has, at least ideally, a capacity to comprehend much if not most of the experience of the race from the beginning, but this experi- ence is dormant in us unless brought out by objective life or observation. It is also the only reservoir and storehouse of introspection. But even our line of descent is restricted, and if we had all that our heredity could possibly bestow, we should be but specialized and partial beings. It is not inconceivable or even impossible that many a species that has become extinct took with it out of the world the promise and potency of a higher psychic development than that of man, but of a radically different type from his. In the annelid or amphioxus stage there was little promise of man who has since sprung from it. Although the highest being that is, he is not perhaps the high- est, or even among the highest, that might have been, to say nothing of what we know nothing of — what may be in other planets, or that will be on ours. The best and only key to truly explain mind in man is mind in the animals he has sprung from and in his own infancy, which so faintly recapitulates them; for about every property of the human mind is found in animal 66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE mind, as those of higher animals are found in the powers of the lower.
Each species is a special set of reactions and adaptations to a certain environment and illustrates a moving equilibrium of forces. Now much that was in the past has quite lapsed from consciousness, and therefore can only be studied in motor re- sponses and subconscious psychoses objectively, empirically, and inductively, so that introspection, upon which so much of the philosophy of the past and present rests, is narrow, pro- vincial, and perhaps merely terminal, and possibly even in some sense degenerative. Thus observation must supplement self- analysis, which is merely individual and now often even con- fessedly solipsistic and abortive. The conscious adult person is not a monad reflecting the universe, but a fragment broken off and detached from the great world of soul, always maimed, defined by special limitations, like, yet different, from all others, with some incommensurability parting it off as something unique, well fitted to illustrate some aspects and hopelessly un- able to exemplify or even know other regions in the cosmos of soul. The very self-consciousness that burns so intensely at some point, with attention often so obsessive, blinds us from seeing the larger rest of our selves. Not so much our birth, but every year of growth and every degree of mental illumination, " is a forgetting " of preexisting states and involves a lapse of other sections and activities of soul, as it were, to lower meristic levels, of which augmented self-consciousness involves progressive ignorance.
Highest, narrowest, most apical, and mobile as a tongue of flame is the attentive state of the present flitting moment, related to general personal mind a little as it to the impersonal phyletic, or as it again to general soul. Greatest in intent and least in extent, most foreground and least background, natural, spontaneous attention, with all its special problems and all its marvelous, somatic, and psychic effects, is often in form farthest of all from the depths wherein soul life began. It is most specialized and least germinal. Like the soma of highly special- ized organs, it is most ancillary and most in evidence, but is really valuable only as it serves psychoses, which it can no more see than the sun can see shadows. All psychology that starts or ends here is deciduous. The soul, as it conceives it, is not FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 67 worth saving, although personal immortality, as we have seen, is often the dominant note in thought thus centered. Indeed, the salvation motive that in our day often becomes almost hys- terical is profoundly antiscientific, and the immortality pros- pectors that neglect the past are enemies of real knowledge or sound investigation in this field. The true researcher must be as indifferent to his own salvability as pure science is to crass utility or profit-making, or as the absolute moralist is to pleas- ure or pain here or hereafter. Till our science can cut entirely loose from every soteriological influence and drop the future, which has its true place for study elsewhere, and turn to the past, it can not flourish.
We can not believe that consciousness is even quite the ef- florescence of the human plant. It may be a wart raised by the sting of sin, a product of alienation or a remedial process. We have no warrant that natural selection or the law of the survival of the fittest determines what rises above the highest of the series of thresholds in mind. Consciousness seems in some of its aspects more likely a fall or a process of purgation so far as it is merely adaptive, and that which is best and survives is that which sinks deepest, beyond the test of recallability, and so be- comes most fundamental whether as mental act or organ. In lower forms of life, thought is motion, and later consciousness seems to develop inversely as movement. Feeling may be de- specialization, dissolution, and preliminary to evolution along new lines. The moving phantasmagoria of images and con- scious objects are not the chief facts of mind, as are the many- voiced comments, the sense of assent and dissent, pleasure and pain, the illation of strength or the esthetic responses, the play of intuitions, the impulses to do or not to do, automatic ten- sions or contractions. These are not epiphenomenal, but noumenal in soul life, its palmary facts and experiences.
Conscious life, too, in the best of us is pitifully unorganized and loose-jointed, and it differs perhaps most from the body in its fragmentary, incomplete, and heterogeneous nature. The sanest soul can not escape many mild or incipient insanities, and the most vigorous bear many marks of degeneration. Since writing made permanent records possible, the mind has reared the sublime structure of science, the greatest achievement of the soul thus far, but a very few out of vast multitudes have 68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE done all the work, and any single individual, even the best, but a very small part. Marvelous as the brain is, we have probably yet learned but little how to use or control it, and are still in- fants of mind. As we know more of it, it seems built layer upon layer of partly isolated yet strangely interacting strata. Very ancient hereditary tendencies often push up perhaps even into consciousness, or affect conduct as if striving to be relived and competing for the focus of attention or perhaps leading a submerged life in nearly faded automatisms. Layers are often reversed. Perhaps man acquired his massive brain largely in fighting the great reptiles and mammals of past ages, but now in the individual it is developed very early in life, and so reproduction, although phyletically it develops very early, is now in the individual almost the last power to be evolved to normal function. Some psychic elements are hypertro- phied and some latent and dumb. There are sudden resur- gences of long- forgotten facts, and feelings and impulses of an immeasurable past, while recent salient occurrences often appear to sink to fathomless oblivion. Other experiences and traits, that ought to be less stable because later ac- quired, are sometimes suddenly fixed like adamant with no apparent cause. Instead of the old classic unity, consciousness tends to break up into disparate personalities in each of us, and each mood and time has its own association plexus and its own character. Dreams and narcotics shatter it or dissolve it into nebulous clouds, anger and passion seize the rein and we are demented and bestial for a time. While, on the whole, nor- mal qualities usually have superior momentum and survival power, they may be choked and overcome by lush weeds of vice. Who that is honest and has true self-knowledge will not confess to recognizing in his own soul the germs and possi- bilities of about every crime, vice, insanity, superstition, and folly in conduct he ever heard of? Taine thought every im- pression tended to burgeon to illusory or hallucinatory inten- sity, and that each was kept from doing so by collision with op- posite ones, and thus something like sanity is preserved by an equilibrium or balance between many lunacies. Barbaric and animal traits and instincts jostle and mix with each other in leaderless mobs of impression. Reason makes in every age errors almost as colossal as superstition with which it is often FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 69 veined. In all this flux and chaos, however, common sense, that knows and adjusts to facts and to the external world, and the sciences of nature are the two solidest of all foundations and are represented by the soundest and most firmly woven brain texture; if man can ever bring order into the rest of his confused psychic life it must be by going back to these and working out and upward from them by observational methods in the inner as well as the outer world.
Thus, in fine, the psyche is a quantum and direction of vital energy, the processes of which most need exploration and description, ordering and directing. By looking inward, we see for the most part only the topmost twigs of the buried tree of mind. The real ego is a spark struck off from the central source of all being, freighted with meanings that, could \ve interpret them, would give us the salient facts of its develop- ment history. Its essence is its processes of becoming. It is not a fixed, abiding thing, but grew out of antecedent soul states as different from its present forms as protoplasm is from the mature body. It tends to vary constantly and to depart indefinitely from what it is at any given moment. Every ele- ment has shaped and tempered it. Its long experience with light and darkness, day and night, has fashioned its rhythm indelibly. Heat and cold, the flickering of flame, smoke and ashes, especially since man learned the control of fire, have oriented it toward both thermal extremes. Cloud forms have almost created the imagination. Water and a long apprentice- ship to aquatics and arboreal life have left as plain and indelible marks upon the soul as upon the body. Sky, stars, wind, storms, fetishism, flowers, animals, ancient battles, industries, occupations, and worship have polarized the soul to fear and affection, and created anger and pity. The superficial phe- nomena change, but all the deeper roots of the soul strike down and back to a past that long preceded history. The soul is thus a product of heredity. As such, it has been hammered, molded, shocked, and worked by the stern law of labor and suffering into its present crude form. It is covered with scars and wounds not yet healed. It is still in the rough, and patch- worky, full of contradictions, although the most marvelous of all the products of nature. Where most educated and polished externally, it still has inner veins where barbaric and animal 70 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE impulses are felt. Every individual soul is marked by limita- tions, defects, and arrests, often beside traits of marvelous beauty and virtue. None are complete, perfect, typical. Collec- tive soul, however, is a sensorium of wondrous subtlety that re- flects in its multipersonal facets most, perhaps all, that has been in the world. Our present quest is to detect some characteristic changes at that age of life when a certain group of powers emerges from the past; when heredity is bestowing its latest and therefore highest gifts; when the mind is most exquisitely sensitized to the aspects of nature and to social life, is repeat- ing most rapidly the later neopsychic stages of phyletic expe- riences, and laying on this foundation the corner-stones of a new and unique adult personality.
These considerations must serve here to define the stand- point from which we now proceed to consider the more specific psychic changes which mark adolescence. We here face prob- lems both more complex and more inaccessible than those con- nected with the somatic changes. The most important and basal of these are connected with the fact that powers and facul- ties, essentially non-existent before, are now born, and of all the older impulses and instincts some are reenforced and greatly developed, while others are subordinated, so that new relations are established and the ego finds a new center. In connection with the reproduction function, love is born with all its attendant passions — jealousy, rivalry, and all the manifold phenomena of human courtship. All the previous religious sentiments are regenerated and some now arise for the first time, motivating a wide plexus of new psychic relations be- tween the individual and the race, and irradiating to the cosmos. Nature is felt and plays upon the soul with all its rich orchestra of influences. Art at this time may become an enthu- siasm and is now first deeply and truly felt, even though it had been known and practised before. The ethical life is immensely broadened and deepened, because now a far deeper possibility and sense of sin and impurity arises. The floodgates of hered- ity are thrown open again somewhat as in infancy. As in the prenatal and infant stage man hears from his remoter fore- bears back perhaps to primitive organisms, now the later and higher ancestry takes up the burden of the song of life, and the FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 71 voices of our extinct and perhaps forgotten, and our later and more human ancestry, are heard in the soul. Just as in the first birth the gifts of nature are of fundamental psycho-physic qual- ities, which are later elaborated and differentiated by develop- ment, so now her rich dotations are generic, and the accessory qualities that are unfolded out of them arise slowly from the feelings, instincts, impulses, dispositions, Anlangcn and Tricbe, which are the products of this later heritage.
In some respects, early adolescence is thus the infancy of man's higher nature, when he receives from the great all- mother his last capital of energy and evolutionary momentum. Thus the child is father of the man, far older and conditioning his nature. He is at the same time reduced back to a state of nature, so far as some of the highest faculties are concerned, again helpless, in need not only of guidance but of shelter and protection. His knowledge of self is less adequate and he must slowly work out his salvation. Character, temperament, emo- tions, and appetites are changed; the youth moves about in both an inner and an outer world unrealized. The parent and teacher must understand that mother nature has again taken her child upon her knee and must stand off a little to see and make room for her more perfect education. These years again, like infancy, should be sacred to heredity, and we should have a good warrant indeed before we venture to interfere with its processes.