Psychic adolescence is heralded by all-sided mobilization. The child from nine to twelve is well adjusted to his environ- ment and proportionately developed; he represents probably an old and relatively perfected stage of race-maturity, still in some sense and degree feasible in warm climates, which, as we have previously urged, stands for a long-continued one, a terminal stage of human development at some post-simian point. At dawning adolescence this old unity and harmony with nature is broken up; the child is driven from his paradise and must enter upon a long viaticum of ascent, must conquer a higher kingdom of man for himself, break out a new sphere, and evolve a more modern story to his psycho-physical nature. Because his en- vironment is to be far more complex, the combinations are less stable, the ascent less easy and secure; there is more danger that 7* THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the youth in his upward progress, under the influence of this "excelsior" motive, will backslide in one or several of the many ways possible. New dangers threaten on all sides. It is the most critical stage of life, because failure to mount almost al- ways means retrogression, degeneracy, or fall. One may be in all respects better or worse, but can never be the same. The old level is left forever. Perhaps the myth of Adam and Eden describe this epoch. The consciousness of childhood is molted, and a new, larger, better consciousness must be developed, or increased exposure and vulnerability will bring deterioration. Before this, boys and girls have been inter- ested largely in those of their own age and have had little interest in their future or in the life of adults. Their own life is too varied, intense, and absorbing. But the soul now realizes in a deeper sense the meaning of maturity and is protensive toward its higher plateau. Slowly the color and life fade from juvenile interests, which are deciduous like foliage or like milk teeth. Vocations beckon first faintly, and then more and more imperatively. Hero worship arises; youth aspires to excel, first perhaps by the order of nature in athletic contests, then in those of the mind. The young savage can not attain his new name or be initiated into adolescence until he has shown prowess or won some fame as a doer of deeds, as, e.g., by killing some large animal or in successful head-hunting. It is perhaps on the athletic field that youth has his first taste of gratified ambition and is fired thereby to constant discontent and Sehnsucht there- after. He longs to struggle, make an effort, combat, loves a hard and strenuous and scorns an easy life. The great deeds and lives and prizes in the human world never shine so bright, seem so near, or beckon so alluringly. The youth wills all that he must or can; would be wise, strong, famous, talented, learned, rich, loved, and withal good and perfect. When the thought of death forces its presence upon his soul, though at first cast down, he reacts by immortal longings. The tran- scendental world opens before him; he dreams of an ideal future of the race or of a heaven where all his wishes shall be realized in the glory of the world to be; and in these " vague snatches of Uranian antiphony," instead of its finding remi- niscences of the preexistent state of the soul, the more progres- sive Occidental world sees anticipations of a future immortality, FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 73 as it has taken its conceptions of paradise from the past where antiquity placed them, and reconstructed them and set them up in the future.
This long pilgrimage of the soul from its old level to a higher maturity which adolescence recapitulates must have taken place in the race in certain of its important lines long before the historic period, because its very nature seems to in- volve the destruction of all its products and extinction of all records. Just as the well-matured adult, as is elsewhere shown, has utterly lost all traces and recollection of the perturbations of the storm and stress period, because they are so contradictory and mutually destructive and because feelings themselves can not be well remembered, so the race must have gone through a long heat and ferment, of which consciousness, which best de- velops in stationary periods, was lost, partly because growth was so rapid. Incidents are never better remembered by the individual, but they are never more transformed and changed, and just so the precious but often grotesque myths and legends of races, sacred to them but often meaningless to others, afford the only traces of ethnic adolescence which races retain. They are told about camp-fires, perhaps laboriously and allegorically interpreted or developed into literary form with the same gusto with which the man recounts in ever more mythic form the most vivid incidents his memory has rescued from the turmoil of these years of transformation and reconstruction, when na- ture's first call is heard to go out from the home to some prom- ised land or career, to establish a new domicile for body and soul, and to be the progenitor of offspring of both, that to the inflamed youthful heart seem like the stars of heaven in number.
Youth loves intense states of mind and is passionately fond of excitement. Tranquil, mild enjoyments are not its forte. The heart and arteries are, as we have seen, rapidly increasing in size, and perhaps heightened blood pressure is necessary to cause the expansion normal at this stage. Nutritive activities are greatly increased; the temperature of the body is probably a trifle higher. After its period of most rapid growth, the heart walls are a little weak, and peripheral circulation is liable to slight stagnation, so that in the interests of proper irrigation 44 74 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of the tissues after the vascular growth has begun, tension seems necessary. Although we do not know precisely the rela- tion between blood pressure and the strong instinct to tingle and glow, some correlation may safely be postulated. It is the age of erectile diathesis, and the erethism that is now so in- creased in the sexual parts is probably more or less so in nearly every organ and tissue. The whole psycho-physic organism is expanding, stretching out, and proper elasticity that relaxes and contracts and gives vaso-motor range is coordinated with the instinct for calenture or warming up, which is shown in phenomena of second breath in both physical and mental activ- ity. In savage life this period is marked by epochs of orgasm and carousal, which is perhaps one expression of nature's effort to secure a proper and ready reflex range of elasticity in the circulatory apparatus. The " teens " are emotionally unstable and pathic. It is the age of natural inebriation without the need of intoxicants, which made Plato define youth as spiritual drunkenness. It is a natural impulse to experience hot and perfervid psychic states, and is characterized by emotionalism. This gives a sense of vitality and the hunger for more and fuller life. This desire to feel and to be very much alive, and the horror of inertness and apathy, is, as we saw in Chapter V, one of the chief features which incline youth to intoxicants. Indeed, everything men strive for — fame, wealth, knowledge, power, love — are only specialized forms of the will to attain and to feel the maximum of vitality. Hence comes the pro- clivity to superlativeness, to high, lurid color and fast life, be- cause youth must have excitement, and if this be not at hand in the form of moral and intellectual enthusiasms, it is more prone, on the principle of kinetic equivalents, to be sought for in sex or in drink. Athletic enthusiasm, the disposition of high school and college youth to yell and paint the town, to laugh, become boisterous and convivial, are better than sensuality and reduce temptation to it. Better that a few of the most promis- ing youth should be maimed or even killed on the gridiron or in college rushes, or lose standing in their devotion to teams and to emotional culture, than that they should find excesses, some forms of which seem necessary now, in the lower life of sinful indulgence, which is so prone to stunt and arrest the precious last stages of growth in mind and body. More or less FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 75 of this erethic diathesis is necessary and inevitable, and one of the chief problems of education is to prevent its lower forms and give it ever higher vents and fields. Interest in and devo- tion to all that is good, beautiful, and true is its loftiest ex- pression, but it is often best cultivated on a lower plane, to be applied later on the higher.
We here see the instability and fluctuation now so charac- teristic. The emotions develop by contrast and reaction into the opposite. We will specify a few of its antithetic impulses now so marked.
i. There are hours, days, weeks, and perhaps months of over- energetic action. The young man trains with ardor; perhaps breaks a record; sleep may be reduced; he studies all night in a persistent cram; is» swept away by some new fad; is exalted and hilarious and then reacts; is limp, languid, inert, indiffer- ent, fatigued, apathetic, sleepy, lazy; feels the lack of motive power, and from overwork and excessive effort, when he goaded himself to do or die, he relapses to a dull state of relax- ation and doubts whether anything is really worth while in the world. Thus youth now is really and easily overworked; is never so fresh or more rested as when at the top of its condi- tion, but very easily wearied and exhausted with the languor due to overtraining. We have seen that early adolescent years are prone to be sickly, although the death rate is now lowest, and this is closely connected with the changes from overeffi- ciency to low tension so frequent. Sometimes the stage of torpor comes first or predominates and causes friends to be anxious. Many great men, as we saw in Chapter VIII, loitered in their development, dawdled in their work and seemed to all about them entirely unpromising; but later woke up, went to work, made up for lost time, and outstripped their fellows. These changes are perhaps in slight degree modified by weather, like moods, and have no doubt a physiological basis. Sometimes it is as if anemia and hyperemia followed each other with extreme sloth and then almost convulsive activ- ity of motor centers. There are periods when one can do easily twice the ordinary task without fatigue. Girls of fifteen or sixteen would often like to sleep or rest a week, and seem in- capable of putting forth real effort, and then there are fevers 76 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of craving hard and even disagreeable work. Many returns show that in the spring there is very often great loathing to exert one's self, but this is occasionally broken by hours, days, or even weeks of supernormal activity, when stints are not only completed, but extra and self-imposed tasks are done with alac- rity and satisfaction. Often there is a periodicity of activity in young men that suggests a monthly and sometimes a seasonal rhythm. The regular changes of day and night do not suffice, but this is complicated by some larger cycle of alternating re- cuperative and energetic periods of latent and patent, or inner and outer work. This, like so much else, suggests an atavistic trace of savage life, more controlled by moon and tides and warm and cold seasons. Indeed, diurnal regularity of work, play, food, and sleep is a recent thing in the development-his- tory of man, is hard to establish, and in the vagrant, criminal, vicious, and pauper class is often never reached. But spells of overactivity, alternating with those of sluggishness and inert- ness, still seem in these years like neural echoes of ancient hunts and feasts, fasts and famines, migration and stagnation. Now at least nature pushes on her work of growth by alternation, now centering her energies upon function, now upon increase in size of organs, and perhaps by this method of economy at- tains a higher level than would be reached by too much poise, balance, and steadiness. It is as if the momentum of growth energies had to overcome obstacles at every point, by removing now this, now that hindrance, where if its energies had been applied to all simultaneously they would have been less effec- tive.
2. Closely connected with this are the oscillations between pleasure and pain — the two poles of life, its sovereign masters. The fluctuations of mood in children are rapid and incessant. Tears and laughter are in close juxtaposition. Their emo- tional responses to impressions are immediate. They live in the present and reflect all its changes, and their feelings are little affected by the past or the future.1 With the dawn of adolescence, the fluctuations are slower and often for a time 1 See Karl Just: Die Gefiihle des Frohsinns und der Heiterkeit und der Wech- sel der Stimmung im Gemuthsleben des Kindes. Jahrbuch des Vereins f. wis. Fed., also his Gefuhlsleben des Kindes.
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 77 more extreme, and recovery from elation and especially from depression is retarded. The past, and still more the future, is involved, and as the mental life widens, either tendency acquires more momentum. Youth can not be temperate, in the philo- sophical sense. Now it is prone to laughter, hearty and per- haps almost convulsive, and is abandoned to pleasure, the field of which ought gradually to widen with perhaps the pain field, although more. There is gaiety, irrepressible levity, an euphoria that overflows in every absurd manifestation of excess of ani- mal spirits, that can not be repressed, that danger and affliction, appeals to responsibility and to the future, can not daunt nor temper. To have a good time is felt to be an inalienable right. The joys of life are never felt with so keen a relish; youth lives for pleasure, whether of an epicurean or an esthetic type. It must and ought to eft joy life without alloy. Every day seems to bring passionate love of just being alive, and the genius for extracting pleasure and gratification from everything is never so great.
But this, too, reacts into pain and disphoria, as surely as the thesis of the Hegelian logic passes over to its antithesis. Young people weep and sigh, they know not why; depressive are almost as characteristic as expansive states of conscious- ness. The sad Thanatopsis mood of gloom paints the world in black. Far-off anticipations of death come in a foreboding way, as it is dimly felt, though not realized, that life is not all joy and that the individual must be subordinated and eventually die. Hence statistics show, as we have seen, a strange rise in the percentage of suicides. Now there is gloom and anon spon- taneous exuberance. In 766 of Lancaster's returns, thirteen had thought seriously of suicide, although only three had suc- cessfully attempted it. Perhaps elation precedes and depres- sion comes as a reaction in the majority of cases, although this is not yet clear. Some feel despondent on awakening, at school time, or at noon, suggesting nutritive changes. " The curve of despondency starts at eleven, rises steadily and rapidly till fif- teen, culminates at seventeen, then falls steadily till twenty three." Young people are often unaccountably pleased with every trifle. They can shout for joy from the very fact of being alive. The far-off destiny of senescence looms up, and in fatigue the atrabiliar psychic basis of pessimism clouds 7 8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE life for a time and brings into dominance a new set of associations like another personality. Youth fears inade- quacy of its powers to cope with the world. How this is connected with the alternating extremes of sexual tension, we have seen, although this by no means explains all. Some- times the tears are from no assignable cause, and often from factitious motives. Suspicion of being disliked by friends, of having faults of person or character that can not be overcome; the fancy of being a supposititious child of their parents, of having unwittingly caused calamity to others, of hopeless love; failure in some special effort; a sense of the necessity of a life of work and hardship — these bring moods that may be more or less extreme according to environment, heredity, temperament, and other causes, may succeed each other with greater or less frequency, and may threaten to issue in brooding, depression, and melancholy, or in a careless and blind instinct to live for the day; but these, too, are due to the fact that the range of pleasure and pain is increased, so that there are new motives to each, and perhaps a long period with occasional special dangers must elapse before a final adjust- ment.
This is the age of giggling, especially with girls, who are at this stage of life farthest from Vassey's l view that man is not originally a laughing animal and that the gentleman and lady should never laugh, but only smile. If convulsive laughter is an epilepsy, it is one that begins in the highest regions and passes down the meristic levels.2 Goethe well says, that noth- ing is more significant of men's character than what they find laughable. The adolescent perhaps is most hilarious over cari- cature of nationalities, teachers, freshmen, the other sex, etc., who are mimicked, burlesqued, and satirized. Ridicule is now a powerful weapon of propriety. Again, the wit of the ephebos sometimes provokes a mental ticklishness about certain sacred and sometimes sexual topics, which may make jocularity and waggishness almost a plague. Another of the chief butts of adolescent fun is what is naive and unconscious; the blunders 1 The Philosophy of Laughing and Smiling. London, 1877, p. 194. 9 The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic, by G. Hall and the late Arthur Allin. Am. Jour, of Psy., October, 1897, vol. ix, pp. 1-41.
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 79 of the greeny, the unsophisticated way not only of the fresh- man, but of the countryman, the emigrant, and the Backfisch girl now abound, while the simple idea of disaster or misfortune, which constitutes the humor of nine-tenths of the professional joke-makers, is rare. The horror of old or even once-told jests is never so intense, nor the appreciation for novelty so keen.
3. Self-feeling is increased, and we have all degrees of ego- ism and all forms of self-affirmation. The chief outcrop may be vanity and a sense of personal beauty and attractiveness, that is felt to be stunning to the other sex. It may be expressed in swagger ways; thrusting one's self into conspicuous places; talking, acting, dressing, to attract notice; or in complacency and even conceit for supposed superiority over others. Impu- dence, affront, insult, and sometimes even physical aggressive- ness are forms of it. 'Growth of mind and body is so rapid that it is felt to the point of overestimation. Self-feeling is fed by all the compliment and sweet flattery of affection, which is the food often really tasted for the first time with true gusto, on which it shoots up with mushroom growth. The wisdom and advice of parents and teachers is overtopped, and in ruder na- tures may be met by blank contradiction. It is all a new con- sciousness of altitude and the desire to be, and to be taken for, men and women;' to be respected, consulted, and taken into confidence. The new sense of self may be so exquisitely deli- cate that a hundred things in the environment, that would never rankle before, now sting and irritate. This is sometimes expressed in more or less conscious and formulated codes of honor, which among youth is often a strange and wondrous thing which must be defended by the wager of battle, with fists, or among German students with the sword, with all the punc- tilio of chivalry. Sometimes the formulae by which honor and self-respect may be gained, maintained, impaired, and restored are detailed. Courage, honesty, parents, especially the mother, and perhaps a sweetheart, are involved, and the youth must perhaps represent honor for two. Ideals are so high and the tedious labor by which they are attained so constitutionally ignored that the goal seems very near and attainable if the pur- pose is high, so that the spirited, mettlesome ephebos or cadet summarily demands the world to take him on credit, as if the promise of his ambition were already fulfilled. The youth who 80 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE has been amenable to advice and even suggestion, now becomes obstreperous, recalcitrant, filled with a spirit of opposition, and can not repress a sense of top-lofty superiority to the ways and persons of his environment. Age is often made to suffer dis- courtesy, and it sometimes seems as though the faculties of reverence and respect, to say nothing of admiration, were sud- denly gone.
But the ebb of this tide is no less pronounced, and may pre- cede in time its flood. The same youth with all his brazen effrontery may feel a distrust of self and a sinking of heart, which all his bravado is needed to hide. He doubts his own powers, is perilously anxious about his future, his self-love is wounded and humiliated in innumerable ways keenly felt, per- haps at heart resented, but with a feeling of impotence to resist. The collapsing moods bring a sense of abasement and humil- iation, which sometimes seems like a degree of complacency to all that comes, suggesting spiritlessness. Youth often fears itself lacking in some essential trait of manhood or womanhood, or wanting the qualities of success. He is often vanquished in innumerable rivalries and competitions that now make so much of life, and loses heart and face. The world seems all the more hopeless because of the great demands which the opposite mood has imposed. Sometimes a sense of shame from purely imaginary causes is so poignant as to plunge the soul for a time into the deepest and most doleful dumps; fancied slights suggest despair, and in place of wonted self-confidence there is a retiring bashfulness, which no coaxing or encourage- ment of friends can overcome or fathom, and which may express itself only in some secret diary or perhaps in prayer. This, too, of course, often shades into elation and depression from moral causes.
Youth, too, may become overfastidious and effeminate, and this may pervade toilet, manners, care for health, or even take the form of moral nicety, overscrupulousness, and casuis- try. Time was when the freshman was really green, awkward, inept in speech, without repose, but now too often the sub- freshman is a polished gentleman, confident and at home every- where, though happily often betraying in some respects the ear- marks of the native roughness which goes along with strength, in the midst of the overrefinement, suggestive of weakness.
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 81