1 An interesting little book, purporting to be written by a Chinaman, has at- tracted much attention.2 He says his countrymen profoundly mistrust and dislike our Western civilization. Their institutions have given a stability unknown in Europe, and whether our religion is better or not, it has less influence on our soci- ety. There, moral relations come first, and here, economic interest rules and morality is grafted on. No Westerner is content or has leisure, and these traits to a Chinaman are a mark of barbarism. Much as our sciences and arts are supe- rior, they would not compensate China for the loss in imitating our institutions. In China, a man begins and ends life a member of his family group, which has its common property, altar, and tribunal for settling disputes. Progress would be bought too dearly if it left no leisure from the work of acquisition of the means of living for life itself. They never sought intercourse with the West either to pros- elyte or to trade. They produce what they consume and consume what they pro- duce, and are stable because economically independent. We believe not only that our religion is the only true one, but would impose it on others. To open a new market is the only essential motive of the West in its dealings with China. England is still blinded by the wealth it has derived from India. But China is homogeneous, and India is not. Our legislature is chiefly an effort to regulate the disorder of our economic system. "Your poor, drunk, incompetent, sick and aged ride you like a nightmare. You have dissolved all human and personal ties and try to replace them by the impersonal activity of the state. The salient characteristic of your civilization is its irresponsibility. You are liberated from your own control and are caught in your own levers and cogs. In every department you substitute for the individual the company, and for the workman the tool. The competition for market promises to be a more fruitful cause of war than was ever in the past the ambition of princes or the intrigue of priests. The peoples of Europe fling themselves like hungry beasts of prey on every yet unexploited quarter of the globe, and when nothing is left to divide they will fall upon one another. Their armaments have brought them within sight of a general war of extermination."
In China, thousands of communities live without any law save that of custom and propriety. The first question considered when change is proposed is its effects on morality. In England, all that is not urban is parasitic or else moribund. We are divorced from nature, but unreclaimed by art; instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable of thought. Trained in the traits of a religion not really believed, Western morals are as conventional as creeds. There is everywhere means and nowhere ends. In a riot China sent not policemen but a delegate to learn the rioters' point of view. They were found right and the required guarantees were given. The Chinese are trained to perceive the finest relations of life, to enjoy nature and work. This can not be given, but it can easily be taken away.
In China government is almost dispensed with, and if it ceased to exist the life of the people would go on, and many would hardly miss it. It can impose nothing 1 Letters from John Chinaman. London, 1902, p. 63.
74* THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE posed and erupting, where ethnology has many analogies with geol- ogy. Caste makes life of naturally repellent social units dominant with one great idea, stamps everything with irrevocable heavenly sanction, and has elaborated tribes, clans, septs, castes, subcastes, outcastes, religious orders, devotional brotherhoods, occupations with no end of ceremonial rules and prescriptions, tabooing many common acts of life, making it necessary for a Western schoolmaster to throw on the people against their will and customs. The law obeyed is that of the sub- jects' own nature. Education fits to govern but it often disqualifies to carry elec- tions. Religion should be the soul of the state, its body. There are everywhere superstitions and beliefs in rites, but these are extraneous to true religion. Con- fucius discouraged occupation with the supernatural. All live eternally, so ances- tor worship is a symbol of an immense social idea of humanity, past, present, and future, like Comte's grand etre. Humanity mediates between heaven and earth. Brotherhood and the dignity of labor are its corner-stones. The Western idea of life makes it an episode whose centre is elsewhere. In the ferment of early Chris- tian centuries the ideal was worsted. The West separates religion and State and abandons society to economy and politics. Those who take Christianity seriously are driven to revolution. Jesus was inexperienced, untraveled, young, unlearned; and yet his noble ideal was more inspiring than any other, but he was unfit to guide a commonwealth. So in the West temporal and spiritual powers are arrayed against each other. Jesus condemned violence and would turn the other cheek, but we hold force essential to preserve society. Confucianism has made the nation one, has taught horror of violence and made right so well supported that it has no need to appeal to might, and by honoring father and mother the days of the race have been long. Now, "In the name of Christ you have sounded the call to arms, in the name of Confucius we respond." The Chinese think the Westerners little better than pirates. The opium the West introduced is a curse to the land. When smuggling was evaded the stock was destroyed, and as a result of the opium war thus caused, Hongkong was taken.
Suppose China had permanently occupied Liverpool, Bristol, and Plymouth, had placed there thousands of men independent of English laws, driven out our vessels, admitted whisky duty free, placed agents at all points to counteract the teachings of our Church and undermine our society; in such conditions it would not be surprising if the Chinese legation in London were surrounded by a howling mob. Let Jesus himself judge between us. Religion is used in the West as a weapon of war. The cross is the pioneer of the sword. The proudest nation in the world has been humiliated. Its people have been treated not as Western nations would treat each other, but like barbarians. Has there ever been a greater breach of international comity? With the spectacle of a Christian Kaiser sending his troops on an errand of revenge, and conjuring them, in the name of him who bade us turn the other cheek, not merely to attack and kill, but to kill without quarter, how idle to claim that the Western religion in its essence is higher than Eastern! It is not Christian.
On this see the 16 Reports, ending September 30, 1903, of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese. Also J. I. Ball, Things Chinese, 1893; Harlez, Anthropologie Chinoise, 1896; Lemire, Lea Moeurs du Indo-Chinoise, 1902.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 743 sods at the low-caste boys in his room lest those of high caste should deem him contaminated by touch. The Brahmans can only walk abroad at midday, when their reduced shadows can not be denied, but in the morning and evening, when they lengthen, they must hide themselves with their shadows to more isolated retreats. Everything here is tangled, disordered, incongruous, with a din of discordant rites, with a mob of gods, " who abhor a fly's death and those who still delight in human sacrifice"; where religions are jumbled to- gether, history is disfigured with wild mythology, poetry treated as literal prose and plain fact, and science mystified, most of it permeated by later Mohammedan rule, but now under the sway of a few Eng- lishmen who are hated but revered for the seeming quality of justice, and whose psychic conquest is represented by the prohibition of burning widows, killing daughters, or burying lepers alive. Here, as in the later Roman period, many faiths have taught toleration and even hunger for novelties in religion, where each has somewhere dug a well and made an oasis. India is not only as heterogeneous as China is homogeneous, but it is mainly composed of villages and rural people, while China is essentially municipal. Several millions of the brightest minds of India are already infected with Occidental science, culture, and civilization. Moreover, they are of our own Aryan blood. Oldfield, who went to India full of mission faith and zeal, saw the other side, and pronounces mission work in India a real failure, yet holds that if Jesus and Paul appeared there they would find a waiting world and would win over the heart and mind of the whole race. The missionary assumes that his type of Christianity is the only true religion and that all other modes of seeking God are heathen idolatry. He knows far less of the Shastras and the Vedas than the Hindus do of the Bible. The latter read the reports of the missioners and consider them dishonest in claiming to have accomplished too much and painting native life in too dark colors. Their course is compared with that of a Hindu missionary who should begin his work in Eng- land by gloating over the faults of Moses or Abraham, ridiculing the miracles of Jonah, and finding lewdness in the doctrine of the Im- maculate Conception. They kill animals and eat flesh. Some succeed among outcasts while nearly all fail with the higher and edu- cated classes. The saintly lives and ascetic practise of the early Christian fathers would win their way, for they would appear to represent a higher and not a lower religion. As Jesus praised the beautiful teeth of the carcass of a dead dog, so we must begin by learning the good in other faiths. Our pagan ancestors were won by having their heathen practises sanctified and not ridiculed. Of their own teachers they expect a life of devotion to spiritual study, to fathom divine mysteries, but a group of natives won a wager from Oldfield by finding the Christian missionary at a club in flannels with a tennis racket. Paul would not eat flesh or drink wine if it made his brother to offend, but missionaries do not bathe or re-dress before eating, and associate largely with their own countrymen. Early 744 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Christendom won its way by martyrdom and pure and simple lives.1 Agnosticism was overcome because most of what was best in it was assimilated. Religious propaganda must find in contemporary life elements that can be employed as media for expressing its inner self. " Born of the spirit," says Harnack,2 " the Church learned to conse- crate the earthly " and mold the environment. Indeed, of old it went so far in this work as to incorporate as essential what was only the product of accommodation. By this course, as always, the Church at first gained, but later had to pay the penalty. Again, in a yet larger sense, our age is cosmopolitan, and we have to know the early Christianity for a new lesson of variety of appeal and the power to select the many and varied coefficients from a very complex environ- ment. Otherwise Christianity can never become a universal religion. At the same time everything must be simplified, for the history of religion shows that its really vital core is narrow. Thus only uni- versalism that finds nothing entirely alien to it can be also intensive and its subsequent systematization abiding. Is it possible that all the lessons of anthropology count for nothing here? Have there been no improvements in methods since John Williams, Judson, Carey, and Moffat, or are they still ideals? Has not the work of Neesima in Japan and Crowthers in Africa taught us the immense advantage of natives trained in Europe in reaching their fellow countrymen?
Mission work should be regarded as a part of pedagogy and be included in the work of this department in every uni- versity and college just as the psychology of lower races should be included in every course in psychogenesis. The human soul is indefinitely vaster and more complex than it ever entered into the heart of any psychologist to conceive it. The germs of every faith are in every soul to a degree un- known in religious Philistia or philosophic Bohemia. Lives of missionaries have for me always had a peculiar charm. It would be easy to collect appalling and disastrous blunders of those who have as it were gone to Mohammedanism with a gospel bound in pigskin, to Buddhism with one bound in calf- skin, who have offended every prejudice and admitted no explanation but the worst. To one, India is a wounded cobra that would strike back, a perfect type of the old serpent with the sting of sin. Another sees nothing but " pure abomination worship " in Mohammedanism. Another finds " only folly, *The Failure of Christian Missions in India. Hibbert Journal, April, 1903. * See Harnack's Die Mission u. Ausbreitung des Christentum in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten. Berlin, 1902.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 745 blindness, and superstition " in Burma, and one tells us that among the followers of Confucius " every vice is tolerated if not sanctioned." Brahmanism is " a tangle of absurd and meaningless mythologies." It is grueling to feel the havoc such stodgy religious buccaneers must have wrought on the souls of those they so desired to save. But work like that of A. Mackay in Uganda, of G. L. Mackay in Formosa, J. E. Paton in the New Hebrides, and a score more of the best modern heroes of the mission field, and all the new awaken- ing, marks the present as a time of epoch-making progress. But far better things yet must impend.
As with the other topics of this chapter, space has for- bidden here more than to take a very hasty and utterly in- adequate glance at a vast field full of complex and now very rapidly growing interests. It suffices, however, for my present purpose simply and in fine to urge that the psychology of religious growth is now teaching us the desirability of laying long and chief, though not exclusive, stress upon the Old Testament in dealing with pre-adolescent children, and reserving the most intensive teaching of the New Testament for the teens. Savages are children and youth, and the races that live under the influence of the higher non-Christian ethnic faiths also especially need to be kept in the pupillary state toward their own faith long enough to make it a kind of Old Testament propaedeutic to the New. For a long period in the Christian Church the Old Testament was com- paratively neglected, but is now coming to abundant honor, both among scholars and as subject-matter of religious teach- ing. We realize anew how every intelligent conception of Christianity rests upon it, and how the wondrous pedagogic genius of Jesus used it as a basis for his sublime evangel of love to God and man. His standpoint may be indefinitely developed along the lines of impulsion he gave, but we can not conceive how it can ever be transcended, because it rests on the strongest and most essential elements of the human soul. In making the Hebrew rites and writings the propaedeutic to his new religion, he should be regarded not only as the founder of a new faith but as having given the world an object-lesson of how to relate the gospel to other indigenous faiths. If Christianity is ultimate and is fit to be a universal religion, it must be shown to be related to Buddhism, Brah- 746 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE manism, Confucianism, and other and perhaps all indigenous religions somewhat as it is to Judaism. It must be shown to be prefigured, anticipated in each, and each must be shown to be fulfilled in it in analogous ways. Those who proclaim it must be as sympathetic and as instructed in the letter and spirit of the native faith as Jesus was in that of Hebraism, and have served an apprenticeship like his to it. This postu- lates a long and hard work yet to be done. There will be many new emphases and exegeses. Much that we have tried to destroy will have to be fulfilled, and our own religion will be inconceivably enlarged and glorified by new insights and reveal new power. We shall exalt Mohammed, Kung-tsi, Buddha, and scores of great ancient seekers after God in many lands, ways, tongues, and centuries, as antetypes, law- givers, prophets, or forerunners of Jesus, who will be all the more exalted because all ethnic lines and not one alone will converge in him. Sympathy with the good, and not criticism of the bad, should be as much the rule as in both the new and old studies of the Jewish Scripture. Perhaps canonical will have to be distinguished from low level production now revered as the Jews set apart Talmudic and Massoretic texts from the Pentateuch, Psalms, and Prophets, or as early Christians distinguished apocryphal literature from the sacred books. Here is an opportunity to emulate the best that the heroes of Christendom have accomplished from the times of the fathers to our own, and more and better yet to vie with the methods of Paul himself, who made Greek culture a pro- paedeutic of the new faith somewhat as Jesus did that of the Hebrews, only in less degree. His missionary triumphs among the Gentiles were because he could reach the intelligent classes and did not confine his activity to the ignorant, de- graded, and outcast. Perhaps Jesus was wiser than his mundane self-consciousness realized, and perhaps his light shone forth far brighter than it would have done had the Jews not rejected him and thus laid on him the necessity of unfold- ing the latent potentiality of their faith into universality. But if he had been born into any other of the great religions of the world and been so treated, it is impossible to conceive that he would not have made it blossom into the same gospel he taught and have shown it, whatever it was, to be just as open and natural a preparation for his teaching as he showed Juda- ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 747 ism to be. Some of them perhaps to his transcendent genius would have revealed even more prelusions and have opened up yet broader as they certainly could have done more popu- lous highways of approach. (See Chapter XIV.)
Finally, not only has progress been most glacierly slow, but it is not yet adequately defined. If too rapid, it is sure to be bad for virtue, health, and the most valuable knowl- edge. Reclus thinks civilization on the whole no whit in advance of savagery, so much lower than it are slum denizens; and Ranke doubts all real progress in history, believing it to involve extreme differentiation of classes which is itself mor- bific. It is not pessimistic to realize that our civilization is not only a doom and disease when forced precociously upon lower races, but that it has created scores of diseases, made cities biological furnaces where life is consumed, and in gen- eral has a dark as well as a bright side. What if Pobye- donostseff's impeachment of Western civilization has even a grain of truth? What if civilization is at root morbific and sure to end in reaction and decay, as a clever writer urges? 1 There are those who hold that any type of civilization is only a dim candle in one corner of the vast museum of " Man-soul," leaving most of it obscure and some of it pitchy dark. Per- haps he has a mean idea of our race who does not believe in the possibility of very different types of culture and civiliza- tion than ours, but just as good; and may not he be the real barbarian who deems his own age, race, or faith the best and last, to which all must be brought, and insists, with a fanati- cism worthy of the Mahdi, on holiness after our type, or else death? Perhaps our very religion must be more or less re- orientalized to fit the East. Does might so make right that the worst in the victor is better than the best in the victim? Is there anything whatever of great value in the world that has not a deep and ancient ethnic root, and is not everything alien, artificial, and is it not a better ideal to make a good red man, negro, Lapp, or Kaffir, than an indifferent European, and per- 1 Civilization: Its Cause and Cure. London, 1891. See, too, Prince Kropot- kin, Mutual Aid. London, 1902, p. 346. Also Crozier, Civilization and Prog- ress. London, 1894, p. 464. Perhaps no one has seen more clearly how child- hood and youth both resemble and need more knowledge of primitive people or made a more praiseworthy effort to meet the need than L. Frobenius ui his Aus den Flegeljahre der Menschheit. Hanover, 1901, p. 416, 400 cuts.
74-8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE haps even a good heathen than a bad Christian? Is there any barbarism that equals that caused by premature and forced civilization, or any fallacy greater than that those are not cultured who can not do or do not know or revere what we do? The uniformitarians not only have a very dull, monoto- nous world, but their policy lacks prudence, and especially forgets the law of future or projected efficiency on which Kidd has just laid due stress. Galton, Grant Allen, and others urge that the best primitive stirps be preserved as relays where, if our culture becomes effete, it can recuperate its energies, if need be, " by a new rape of the Sabines." Statistics show that college men in our own communities do not even repro- duce their own numbers, so antagonistic is over-individuation to genesis.
Thus, before, back of and independent of all current ques- tions, may we not urge that the time has now come for us to consider occasionally problems of statesmanship and religion and history from the broad standpoint of the education of races with whom a thousand years are hardly as a day? Our democracy needs a type of historical study that glimpses these larger questions, and, while hopeful, does not assume that we are the beati possidentes, or our age the culminating period of history, but rather that its brightest pages are yet to be written because the best and greatest things have not hap- pened yet. Nor does this necessarily imply that even our own blood or our own institutions will dominate the far future. In many lands the victims have been the real conquerors. In later ages other stocks now obscure, and perhaps other tongues now unstudied, will occupy the center of the historic stage, appropriating the best we achieve, as we learn from Semites, Greeks, and Romans. If this be true, every vigorous race, however rude and undeveloped, is, like childhood, worthy of the maximum of reverence and care and study, and may be- come the chosen organ of a new dispensation of culture and civilization. Some of them now obscure may be the heirs of all we possess, and wield the ever-increasing resources of the world for good or evil somewhat perhaps according as we now influence their early plastic stages, for they are the world's children and adolescents.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS Abnormalities of growth, i, 126. Aborigines vanishing, ii, 650. Abstract words, need of, ii, 462. Acceleration of growth, i, 16, 24, 42. Accessory and fundamental move- Accuracy of movement, i, 144. Acquired characters and adoles- cence, i, 50. Acrpmegalia, i, 81. Activity of children, motor, i, 158.
of giants and monsters, i, 41. Adolescence, acquirecf characters biography and, i, 513.
coordination loosened at, i, 127 et seq.
exhaustion at, i, 276.
friendships of, i, 318.
idiocy at, i, 281.
in intellect, ii, 453.
literature and, i, 513.
nonsense in, i, 317.
time and space in, i, 154.
variations in, i, 46. Adolescent insanity, i, 293. Adolescents, psychic changes in, ii, savages as, ii, 649. Africa, puberty rites in, ii, 245. African, traits of, ii, 666. Age and death-rate, i, 249, 251.
of fertility, i, 508.
liability to diseases of, i, 239.
lung growth and, i, 97.
of memory, ii, 492. - of menstruation, i, 474.
of pulse, frequency and, i, 91.
of reason, i, in.
of responsibility, i, 396.
of sickness, i, 243 et seq. Agoraphobia, ii, 216. Agriculture, i, 172 et seq. Albumen in urine, i, 115. Alcoholism, i, 367. Alternations of psychic states, ii, 75 et seq.
Altruism, ii, 81. Amalgamation, ii, 721.
Amenorrhea, i, 496.
American aborigines, puberty with, Amphimixis, ii, 124. Anagenic processes, i, 48. Anger, i, 220 et seq., 354; ii, 367. Animal noises, ii, 25.
psychology, ii, 52. Animals and children, ii, 220.
and man, missing link between, masturbation in, i, 435.
menstruation in, i, 472.
migrations of, ii, 378.
noises of, ii, 25.
pubescent growth in, i, 18. Anthropoid and human, ii, 91. Anthropometry, ideal of gymnastics Anxiety, a neurosis, i, 284-285. Ape-like qualities, i, 57. Ape traits in savages, i, 57. Aquatic organs in man, ii, 192. Arbor Day, ii, 219. Arboreal life, ii, 214.
life and the hand, i, 155. Archeology of mind, ii, 61. Archeopsychisms, ii, 65. Arctic spring, i, 118. Arms, growth of, i, 65. Arterial tension and tone, i, 94. Arteries, growth of, i, 93. Arts and crafts movement, i, 179. Ascending races, ii, 720. Associations devised by adults, ii; Astrology, pedagogic place of, ii,