laurel; cities vied with each other for the honor of having given him birth, their walls were taken down for his entry and imme- diately rebuilt; sculptors, for whom the five ancient games were schools of posture, competed in the representation of his form; poets gave him a pedigree reaching back to the gods, and Pindar, who sang that only he is great who is great with his hands and feet, raised his victory to symbolize the eternal prevalence of good over evil. The best body implied the best mind; and even Plato, to whom tradition gives not only one of the fairest souls, but a body remarkable for both strength and beauty, and for whom weakness was perilously near to wicked- ness and ugliness to sin, argues that education must be so con- ducted that the body can be safely entrusted to the care of the soul and suggests, what later became a slogan of a more de- generate gladiatorial athleticism, that to be well and strong is to be a philosopher — valare est philosophari. The Greeks could hardly conceive bodily "apiSrt from psychic education, and phys- ical was for the sake of mental training. A sane, whole mind could hardly reside in an unsound body upon the integrity of which it was dependent. Knowledge for its own sake, from this standpoint, is a dangerous superstition, for what frees the mind is disastrous if it does not give self-control; better ignorance than knowledge that does not develop a motor side. Body culture is ultimately only for the sake of the mind and soul, for body is only its other ego. Not only is all muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with soft hands, tender feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an anemic girl prodigy, " in the morning hectic, in the evening electric," is a monster. Play at its best is only a school of ethics. It gives noj: only strength but courage and confi- dence, tends to simplify life and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to the will, brings consolation and peace of mind in evil days, is a resource in trouble and brings out individuality.
How the ideals of physical preformed those of moral and mental training in the land and day of Socrates is seen in the identification of knowledge and virtue, " Kennen und Konnen.'* Only an extreme and one-sided intellectualism separates them and assumes that it is easy to know and hard to do. From the ethical standpoint, philosophy, and indeed all knowledge, is GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 205 the art of being and doing good, conduct is the only real subject of knowledge, and there is no science but morals. He is the best man, says Xenophon, who is always studying how to improve, and he is the happiest who feels that he is im- proving. Life is a skill, an art like a handicraft, and true knowledge a form of will. Good moral and physical develop- ment are more than analogous, and where intelligence is sepa- rated from action the former becomes mystic, abstract, and desiccated, and the latter formal routine. Thus mere conscience and psychological integrity and righteousness are allied and mutually inspiring.
Not only play, which is the purest expression of motor heredity, but work and all exercise owe most of whatever pleasure they bring to the past. The first influence of all right exercise for those in health is a feeling of well-being and ex- hilaration. This is one chief source of the strange enthusiasm felt for many special forms of activity, and the feeling is so strong that it animates many forms of it that are hygienically unfit. To act vigorously from a full store of energy gives a re- flex of pleasure that is sometimes a passion and may fairly in- toxicate. Animals must move or cease growing and die. While to be weak is to be miserable, to feel strong is a joy and glory. It gives a sense of superiority, dignity, endurance, cour- age, confidence, enterprise, power, personal validity, virility, and virtue in the etymological sense of that noble word. To be active, agile, strong, is especially the glory of young men. Our nature and history have so disposed our frame that thus all phys- iological and psychic processes are stimulated, products of de- composition are washed out by oxygenation and elimination, the best reaction of all the ganglionic and sympathetic activities is aroused, and vegetative processes are normalized. Activity may exalt the spirit almost to the point of ecstasy, and the physical pleasure of it diffuse, irradiate, and mitigate the sexual stress just at the age when its premature localization is most delete- rious. Just enough at the proper time and rate contributes to permanent elasticity of mood and disposition, gives moral self- control, rouses a love of freedom with all that that great word means, and favors all higher human aspirations.
In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that the race comes very close to the individual youth, 2o6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and that ancestral momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice, raucous with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are hieroglyphs, of most of which we have as yet no good key. Many elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint things we can not apprehend. Later the re- hearsals are fuller, and their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degen- erated from play, but the play field broadens as with succeed- ing generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and muscles know it not.
Gulick ^ has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers were eliminated. Those who could throw unusually well best overcame enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with speed and endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunt- ing and fighting. Now that the need of these is less urgent for utilitarian needs, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival. We inherit tendencies of muscular coordination that have been of great racial utility. The best GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 207 athletic sports and games are composed of these racially old ele- ments, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of great impor- tance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so loves to sit all day and fish? It is because this interest dates back to time immemorial. We are the sons of fishermen and early life was by the water's side, and this is our food supply. This explains why certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is because they touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form, but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic content of them, is the same. Just as psychic states must be lived out up through the grades, so the physical activities must be played off, each in its own time. The best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to develop the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the individual, and it should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular forms which race habit has handed down rather than insist on those arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of heredity. The best guide to the former is interest, zest, and spontaneity. Hereditary momenta really determine, too, the order in which nerve centers come into func- tion. The oldest, racial parts come first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much later. ^ As Hugh- lings-Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the same or- gans as does eating, but those concerned with the former are controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastica- tion, deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus not only the kind but the time of forms and degrees of ex- ercise is best prescribed by heredity. All growth is more or less rhythmic. There are seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded by a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times. Roberts' fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics, which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often surprising develop- ment of lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of twelve, because this nascent period has not yet come. Donaldson showed that if the eyelid of a young kitten be forced open prematurely at * The Influence of Exercise upon Growth, by Frederic Burk. Am. Phys. Ed zo8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE birth and stimulated with light, medullation was premature and imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as Flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension and the development of latent cells; or, as in young children, the nascent period of finger move- ments may stimulate that of the thumb which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their subsequent co- ordination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher level. Thus exercise ought to develop nature's first intention and ful- fil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good but great harm may be done. Hence every determination of these periods is of great practical as well as scientific importance. The following are the chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance of adolescence.
The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity be- tween eight and nine,^ and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may persist. Children can give no better reason why they stop playing with dolls than because other things are liked bet- ter, or they are too old, ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to Venus. Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido, after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or feel- ing, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's ^ student concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played with them in the most realistic 1 A Study of Dolls, by G. Stanley Hall and A. C. Ellis. Ped. Sem., Dec, ' Studies in Imagination, by Lillian H. Chalmers. Ped. Sem., April, 1900, GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION ^og manner, kept them because actually most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But the instinct that '' dolli- fies " new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost al- ways children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the height of the fever, dolls are only in small part representatives of future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is probably false. Nor are doll and child compa- rable to first and second dentition, and it is doubtful if.children who play with dolls as children with too great abandonment are those who make the best mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of motherhood. The number of motor activities that are both inspired and unified by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome direction is almost incredible, and has been too long neglected both by psycholo- gists and teachers. Few purer types of the rehearsal by the individual of the history of the race can probably be found even though we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and assign to each its phyletic correlate.
In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick ^ divides play into three childish periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously, but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to twelve games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive, but in early adolescence " two elements predominate — first, the plays are predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in which there is cooperation among a number for a given end, in which play has a program and an end. The second characteristic of the period is with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage out-of-door life — hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing, fighting, hero ^ Some Psychical Aspects of Physical Exercise. Pop. Sci. Mo., 1898. 15 210 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." " The plays of ado- lescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of cour- age, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."
Croswell ^ found that of 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of amusements, those involving physical exercises pre- dominated over all others, and that " at every age after the eighth year they were represented as almost two to one, and in the sixteenth year rose among boys as four to one." The age of the greatest number of different amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number and pro- gressive specialization occurs. The games of chase, which are suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent In boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys. " A third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their teens are games of contest — games in which the end is in one way or another to gain an advan- tage over one's fellows, in which the interest is in the struggle between peers." " As children approach the teens, a tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no longer makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents and society must, therefore, provide the most favorable condi- tions for the kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the child grows older, society plays a larger role in all the child's amusements, and from the thirteenth year " amusements take on a decidedly cooperative and competitive character, and efforts are more and more confined to the accomplishments of some definite aim. The course for this period will concen- trate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be de- voted to each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask no odds. At fourteen, especially, the impulse is in manual training to make something and perhaps to cooperate.
* Amusements of Worcester School Children. Ped. Sem., September, 1899, GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 2il McGhee ^ collected the play preferences of 15,718 children, and found a very steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to eighteen, but a far more rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to fifteen, and a very rapid rise from six- teen to eighteen. From eleven onward with the most marked fall before fourteen, there was a distinct decline in imitative games for girls and a slower one for boys. Games involving rivalry increased rapidly among boys from eleven to sixteen and still more rapidly among girls, their percentage of pref- erence even exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached nearly seventy per cent. With adolescence specialization upon few plays was markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas with girls in general there were a large number of plays which were popular with none preeminent. Even at this age the principle of organization in games so strong with boys is very slight with girls. Puberty showed the greatest increase of interest among pubescent girls for croquet, and among boys for swimming, although baseball and football, the most favored for boys, rose rapidly. Although the author does not state it, it would seem from his data that plays pecul- iar to the different seasons were most marked among boys, in part at least, because their activities are more out of doors.
Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activi- ties of primitive people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic features. No form of activity is more universal than the dance, which is not only intense but may express chiefly in terms of fundamental movements, stripped of their accessory finish and detail, every important act, vocation, senti- ment, or event in the life of man in language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry seem themselves to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor was cast in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and even tone to secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and social principles. In the dark background of history there is now much evidence that at some point, play, art, and work were not divorced. They all may have sprung from rhythmic movement which is so deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life with least expense. By it Eros ^ A Study in the Play Life of Some South Carolina Children. Ped. Sem., De« cember, 1900, vol. vii, pp. 459-478.
212 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many work-songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, step- ping, the use of flail, lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that arsis and thesis represent flexion and extension, that accent originated in the acme of muscular stress, as well as how rhythm eases work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-canticles are lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used to express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be oscillatory, automat- ically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music, as if the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them, just as all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial, special, vastly complex, and diversified. It is thus natural that during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements should be strongly accentuated. At the dawn of this age boys love marching, and as our returns show there is a very remarkable rise in the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor of repetition the more automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort of constant psychic ad- justment and attention. College yells, cheers, rowing, march- ing, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war, calisthenics and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and foot- ball, basket-ball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are con- certed and intense. These latter emphasize the conflict factor best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill. The effect of musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to make the exercises more fundamental and auto- matic, and to proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine move- ments.
Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasized tempo, experience a great broaden- GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 213 ing of the horizon of consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope, all-conditioning increase in the carry- ing power of attention and the sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods, and all, as I am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in tempo, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed on monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive w^hat war, love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that " the parent of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God " seems borne out not only in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging as a compound pendulum.