been his epithalamium and made the whole world a pastoral Arcady to him at that stage of life when "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, whatever stirs this mortal frame, Are but the ministers of love and feed his sacred flame."
ADOLESCENT LOVE 131 ADOLESCENT LOVE 131 He has the right of sanctuary everywhere, and love has cast out the fears of nature. If the object of affection dies, it is still loved " as some diffusive power," not less, but more, for "so little means so much." All activities are inspired by it; " all journeys end in lovers' meetings," he would " make her glorious by his pen or famous by his sword," for " love rules the court, the camp, the grove, for love is God, and God is love." All else, save love alone, is dross, but sympathetic appreciation and his sultry tropical heart irradiate the world, while poetic license allows most of all liberties in amatory literature and archaic symbolisms of hearts that melt and freeze, or heart- strings that make melody or break in a way physiology knows not of. While he may be " in folly ripe, in reason rotten " — for love is known by follies and Jove laughs at lovers' per- juries, and the whole world, both of science and mythology, is at his command — still love is often so hard a master that it can express itself only inter jectionally with woe alack and well- a-day, or sigh like a furnace or congeal with reserve, because life is so brief and love so long.
This golden stage when life glisters and crepitates, although it may fade like nuptial plumage or fall like ripe petals when the fruit and seed begin to set, has wrought a great work in the soul and infected it with love of beauty everywhere. It is the vernal season of the heart and the greatest of all stimuli for the imagination. It opens the world of fancy which is su- perposed upon that of reality, and which is the totalizing faculty that supplements the limitations of individuality and makes the age of love the natal hour of esthetic appreciation. Art is certainly in part, though not wholly, a higher potency and plateau of love, a different stage or degree and a higher move- ment by the same momentum. If appreciation is a less degree of the same power that creates, and the perfect lover is always a poet, then art is not for its own sake, but for that of love, which should ripen into it. The author of Rembrandt als Erzieher is in essential accord with Vachon, who has made the most comprehensive of all reports on the present condition of art, that most of the great creative minds have achieved fame, not by representing impressions acquired after maturity had been attained or those derived from an environment unfamiliar to them in youth, but with themes they loved in the J32 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE teens and early twenties. If so, this shows that the deepest and largest impressions are made during adolescence, which we know from 'other sources is most plastic and richest in memory pictures. Conversely, if enthusiasm for nature is not then engendered, the soul remains an alien and Philistine through life to all the higher raptures of art. Its holy spirit now knocks at the door of every heart, although its day of grace may be sinned away.
Perhaps we shall never know whether the first song or rude drawing was in the service of love, but we know that it has done and can do great things creatively. The Taj Mahal, per- haps the most exquisite of all poems in marble, scores of fu- neral creations in music, poetry, and eulogy of the dead almost to apotheosis, at least one, and that perhaps the greatest, French system of philosophy, and dramas by the score, have been inspired by and dedicated to loved ones. Moreover, the world so loves lovers that the description of their experiences, real and imaginary, has been perhaps the most prolific of all modern themes in romance and literature, and certainly none has such power to unify to one sharp focus so many diverse incidents and characters, extending over such ranges of time and especially space. As love inspires animals to make bur- rows, nests, and homes, without hands, so many of the greatest creations have been a kind of metaphysical bower-building for those whom the artist loves. The eternally feminine in some woman makes her his Beatrice, leading him to the highest regions of thought for her sake and for her delectation, as the head strives to overtake the heart which has outgrown it. In- deed, love is essentially creative, as well as procreative, and the great makers have probably nearly all been great lovers.
VII. Ethics as a science, and morals as a life, have as their chief purpose to bring man into alinement with the laws of love, whether we are concerned with the minor morals of eti- quette or with ultimate sanctions of good. Plato could not separate beauty and goodness, and our endeavor is to raise the altruism of race to the level of parenthood. For the new ethics we can easily conceive a new scale or hierarchy of virtues, which, provisional as it is, may be of service as an erotometer.
First, of course, comes selfishness normal to children, whose bodies and minds must be fed and whose individualities must ADOLESCENT LOVE 133 be developed to their culmination. Here belong much of the current utilitarianism and the principle of Guyau of the max- imalization of the ego to its point of highest perfection. Es- sential as this is in its nascent stage, no instinct perhaps is more prone to hypertrophy. This may appear in the tendency, which only Max Stirner in recent times has had the hardihood to formulate. Its principle is: I will get, be, do the most possible for myself, no matter how others suffer, provided only I am not found out and made to suffer myself. It may be naive epi- cureanism with a veritable itch for pleasures of sense. Where self-knowledge and self-reverence are no longer curbed by self- criticism, modesty, or sanity, it appears in morbid delusions of greatness. Here belong all the ethical precepts of those virtues that are primarily self-regarding, and in its higher ranges life appears from this standpoint as enlightened selfishness. The root, however, of most failures is that self-interest is not well and largely understood, for when it is, it merges into higher standpoints.
The second stage is entered upon always without this later adequate knowledge, and appears in friendship and especially in love of the opposite sex. The history of friendship,1 which in the sense of Aristotle and Cicero has no doubt been en-' croached on by modern love, shows how it stimulates honor, knowledge, high ambition, and may be one of the great joys of life. Homodoxia, or opinions held in common; homonoia, sentiments mutually shared; mastropia, the art of acquiring friends and making one's self liked; loyalty and even Platonic friendship between the sexes, like that of Waldemar and Hen- riette, whose high intercourse of soul was for a time perturbed by the fear of love, where each human moiety finds its counter- part or helps the other on to perfection, and which can only exist between the good — these are its highest forms. So in the mistress the lover sees another self, and with her would estab- lish an enlarged selfishness for two. Abel 2 and Brinton 3 have pointed out that the etymologies of most words signifying love 8 Linguistic Essays. The Conception of Love in Some Ancient and Modern Languages, p. 25.
3 Brinton: Essays of an Americanist. The Conception of Love in Some Ameri- can Languages, p. 410.
134 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ill ancient and modern languages mean identities, sameness, likeness, fusion, mutual reflection, want, desire, preference, or precious values. The chief Peruvian tongue is called " prob- ably the richest language on the continent, not only in separate words denoting affection, but in modifications of these by im- parting to them delicate shades of meaning through the addi- tion of particles," for it has " nearly six hundred combinations of the word munay = to love." Fundamental as this is, it is always protensive toward something higher, as appears even in such more or less rabulistic descriptions of it as by Michelet, Stendhal, Mantegazza, and even Finck, perhaps the best of his class.
Love of children is a third and higher stage, which may extend down to the unborn, up to the last stage of adolescence, and on to posterity. The test of the virtue of life is to produce and bring to maturity the best children, who shall themselves be most prolific in body and soul. From this standpoint it is trite to say that there is nothing so worthy of love and service as children for whom we must live, and virtue now consists in not evading or laying too much of this function upon the nurse, school, or church, as the cuckoo lays its eggs in nests built by other birds and allows them to incubate and feed its own young.
The community is a larger object of service and devotion. The state was never so dependent as to-day upon those vestals of charity who teach young children and project their own lives and all the love that nature intended for the family into the young, who must first of all be loved in order to be rightly taught. The school is a larger home, and the teacher should be a parent raised to a higher potence. Even in its advanced stages education ought to be " friends seeking happiness to- gether," as Epicurus is said to have defined it. The Greek boy had to awaken by every means in his power the love of some mature man, who would instruct and apprentice him to life, and not to do so was a disgrace. The teacher was inspired first by a love of his pupil's fair body and manners to furnish his soul. The four great schools in the later history of Greece were homo- geneous, because based on friendship, and this sentiment only could give spirit, untie the tongue, double pleasure, halve pain, and open the heart so that teacher and taught could be true ADOLESCENT LOVE 135 ADOLESCENT LOVE 135 lovers, speaking to each other with as little reserve as to their very selves. The teacher was inspired to do nothing unworthy of the respect and idealization which he sought to engender. He should make the pupil not only all that he is himself, but more, as the good parent would make his children what he was unable to become, and all should teach. Morals was the chief theme, and the teacher's life must be a constant and inspiring object-lesson in virtue. It was because this relation was so sacred to affection that pay seemed prostitution. Phillips l has shown how education is the complement of procreation and increases the reproductive sacrifice and rapture. Patriotism, which is ready to serve or even to die for one's country, is only a larger aspect of this stage of love now dimmed and oriented, because the state has drifted from its old gentile sense of an enlarged family and become an organized method of securing liberty, happiness, and property.
The fifth stage is love of the race or enthusiasm for human- ity, the "grand etre " that Comte thought the most worthy of service and worship. Philanthropy, which ministers to the poor and neglected and would save outcasts, or go on missions to dispense the goods of religion, and which ought to be stimu- lated by all monophyletic theories of the origin of man, is just now greatly reenforced by a new cosmic sense, when expansion is not merely a new political dream, but includes the whole world, worships heroes wherever they appear, and deems no human interest alien to itself. The Hindu sage, who is tender to the lowest forms of life, whether from natural goodness of heart or on transmigration theories, St. Francis, who called flowers, worms, birds, and insects his brothers and sisters, and the modern evolutionist, who sees every species, man included, as but different branches of one great family tree, illustrate how adequate love is to a yet larger object, and what a palpi- tating sensorium the heart of man is to everything that lives.
Altruism may go farther yet and embrace nature or all material existence, from every aspect of which the love which goes with knowledge is gradually casting out fear. Jeffries, who buried his face in the grass and prayed to be absorbed in the whole universe; the higher animism, which sees not only 1 The Teaching Instinct. Fed. Sem., March, 1889, vol. vi, pp. 188-246.
I36 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE life, but psychic properties and even personality in stars, stones, clouds, and sea; the pantheist, that conceives the visible universe as simply an incarnation, and the man of science, who would make his brain the oracle even of any department of the grand whole of existence, have reached a yet higher standpoint Perhaps no individual or race passes through all these stages in the phenomenology of love, for neither a single personal nor even one ethnic soul is large enough to do justice to them all. But long before this viaticum is open, the mind modulates over into the field of transcendence and projaculates gods, heavens, hells, and ideals, or, if more philosophical, hypostatizes ideas of goodness, truth, and beauty.1 The final stage is love of being or of all that exists, visible and invisible. The ontological passion culminates thus in a mystic devotion to the absolute in which self is forever merged and swallowed up, and the mind and life find their supreme virtue in anticipating and accepting with joy their inevitable final fate.
Banausic as it would be to insist that these stages are final, I can see only in something of this kind the outcome of the larger interpretations which the Symposium first rudely glimpsed, which Zeller and Schleiermacher sought to bring into conformity with modern knowledge, and which others 2 since have striven in different ways to vindicate or to develop.
VIII. Even knowledge at its best is a form of love. Inter- est is intellectual love, and one of the best tests of education is the number, intensity, and distribution of interests, while one of its best definitions is to teach us to delight in what we should. Even philosophy is not the possession, but the love and wooing of wisdom. C. S. Peirce 3 conceives " agapastic " knowledge 1 See The New Psychology, my inaugural address at Johns Hopkins. An- dover Review, vol. iii, pp. 120-135, 239-438. Also my Aspects of German Cul- 2 See M. Koch: Problem der Erotik, 1886; H. Hille: Ueber die platonische Lehre vom Eros. Liegnitz, 1892. C. Boettischer: Eros und Erkenntniss bei Plato (who would coordinate the Lysis and the Phaedrus). Berlin, 1894. Wachter: Die Liebe als korperlichseelische Kraftiibertragung, 1899. Wyneken: Amor Tntellectus Dei. Eine religiosphilos. Studie, 1898. Santayana: Platonic Love in some Italian Poets — V, in his Poetry and Religion, 1900.
3 Evolutionary Love. Monist, January, 1893. See also his Man's Glassy Essence. Monist, October, 1892; and his Law of Mind, Monist, July, 1892.
ADOLESCENT LOVE 137 as its highest type. By this phrase he means immediate sym- pathetic insight where the object or idea has an instant attrac- tion for the mind by sympathy; where the subject knows, recog- nizes, and closes in with its own, perhaps with an irresistible conviction like that of the Stoics, without waiting for any criti- cal test or coordination with other mental contents. If intuitive certainty thus furnishes the mind with opinions not logically harmonized, this itself is a spur to thought and a surety against stagnation. The term includes growth from within and that love of and confidence in one's own productions which is a part of the creative power of genius, and even if its own origina- tions seem freaks or sports to the systematizer or to current opinion, they are but true spontaneities of the development of the race which has its own logic of mental growth and con- tinuity.
Further, we owe to Horwicz l the view that organized truth, whether in science or philosophy, finds its ultimate criterion in a sentiment, viz., that of conviction. This at bottom is esthetic, because the logical or scientific order pleases the mind best. This satisfaction is not Avanarius's most economic way of think- ing the universe by grouping the largest number of facts under the simplest formula, but may be partly due to the feeling that, while the universe might be so vast as to have no order or char- acter assignable by the mind, it is in fact not only lawful to the core but the whole macrocosm is only the mind writ large. One of man's supreme passions is to conceive the universe as one, the gods as one, and even to postulate an ultimate monism to make the " All " a unitary fact.
Again, for those who deem the relation of the individual to the world the supreme question of knowledge, whether from the standpoint of Shaler 2 or of Royce,3 as well as for all who are impelled to rise from the manifoldness of sense to the unity of reason, the platonic love motive is probably at bottom the animating principle. The self is a hint or image of the Absolute J The Individual: A Study of Life and Death, by N. S. Shaler. New York, 1901. Also G. A. Wyneken, Amor Dei Intellectualis, Greifswald, 1898.
1 The World and the Individual, by Josiah Royce. 48 r3 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE or Divine. We and the world exist just in the degree in which we press to our perfect goal of union with God. But for this passion the world would be indifferent or dead, for the infinite and eternal are as closely associated with love, which first made man metaphysical and transcendent, as light is associated with heat. The conversion or turning from sense to reason under the stress of the gnostic passion is a true euthanasia, or rather the apotheosis, by absorption of the mind, which is individual, in the cosmos.
Especially in all the sciences that deal with life, recent prog- ress has been, step by step, the progressive recognition of Eros. All the work of Darwin, and especially the place he assigns to sexual selection; Weismann's coronation of the supremacy of the germ over the somatic cells; the reconstructions in botany based on growing knowledge of methods of fertilization; the recapitulation theory that the individual repeats the history of his phylum; the derivation of society and the state, from the clan or other origins always gentile; the growing recognition by psychology that, as the will is larger than the intellect, so the instinct and feelings are at the root of both reason and will; the new discovery of the profound meaning of adolescence; gradual psychic embryology and the development of the genetic versus the logical order and standpoint — all these show how the knowledge of life is at root the knowledge of love, and that the latter is really the goal as well as the spring of mind. The world has always vaguely understood how love quickens com- prehension and how the heart fertilizes the intellect, but the full significance of love as an organ of apperception is new. We do not need to reason, prove, or demonstrate in perfect detail, but love identifies from afar; it grows or languishes on tropes, metaphors, or hints unconsciously given and received. When the temple of science, which is the greatest creation of the human race thus far, is near enough complete to reveal its true proportions, no small part of its ministry to life will be the esthetic joy of contemplation. The lives of great discov- erers show that they were animated to their work by a passion- ate love of some department of nature without which no excel- lence is possible. Those who lack it are the sophists, scribes, literalists, and commentators, or minds that go to seed in method, technique, and mechanical classification without mat- ADOLESCENT LOVE 139 ter. In all these ways, therefore, science justifies the ways of love to man.
In fine, from a broad biological standpoint, we conclude in review that every experience of body or soul bears on heredity, and the best life is that which is best for the unborn. Ideal conduct is that which first develops the individual and then subordinates it to the larger interests of the race. At few points are consciousness and theory so inferior to higher un- conscious instinct, which is still the chief regulative of all per- taining to the transmission of life. Education culminates in training for condition for the function. This is the highest criterion. Just so far as we owe what we are to the long line of ancestors from whom our life is derived, so the interests of posterity should be the highest, most pervasive, and most con- trolling ethical motive, and our current instruction in morals should be reconstructed and rebased to this end.
More specifically, the act of impregnating the ovum is the most important act of life. By it the entire momentum of growth is given and upon it completeness of development of the offspring is conditioned. To make this intense and give an inheritance that is all-sided and total, nature seems to require, in ways and for reasons which biology does not yet fully under- stand, special pre-nuptial activities known as courtship, wooing, charming, falling in love, etc. These preliminaries are some- what analogous to secondary sexual qualities, and of both it may be said that the more we know of life the wider they are found to extend. They have been described among slugs, snails, spiders, moths, many insects, and various species of fish, and are highly developed among birds, as the ostrich, cow-bird, Argus pheasant, the tyrant and marsh birds which show off their charms, sing, balz, tremble, and tumble to rouse the pairing instinct in the female and also in themselves. So among many primitive people courtship consists in singing, dancing, plays and games, mimic warfare, or in elaborate toilet, often with a suggestive generative pantomime growing more and more fervent and solicitative, which Ellis thinks pro- vocative of a state of tumescence,1 with a normal climax in coition. Such dances, as he well says, are the most complex 1 Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. iii, sec. i, 1903.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and intense of all forms of muscular, and he might have added of psychic, activity. Every part of the body is involved, and that almost at the same time. There is laughter, shouting, jubilation, ardor, frenzy, violence almost epileptic, motor drunkenness and enormous output of energy and orgy, and often force itself becomes erogenic.
Among higher races the psychic preliminaries are more and the physical less. Love broods, sentimentalizes, poetizes, and perhaps philosophizes. The preludes are more manifold and also more prolonged. The variety of stimuli increases and the range of associations widens. Perhaps this is in some way necessary for the most effective propagation of the higher men- tal, moral, and esthetic qualities. The religious instincts are more involved and marriage is more ceremonial, the arts of persuasion are more elaborate and those of reluctance, modesty, and coyness more formal. Love has more delicious romance and often lingers long in the forecourts of its temple. To ornament, dance, and music, it adds love courts, jousts, more developed dances, pious rites and services, till sometimes this anticipatory stage of imaginative ideality may be so intense and prolonged that the realities of married life suffer and pale.
If this fore-school of love be' necessary to the complete ful- filment of its object, we can now appreciate its degradations in lazy, loveless, overrefined individuals, ages, or races, well matched by theories no less decadent. The view of Montaigne, More, and Fere,1 that the genesic impulse is at root one of evacuation, and even that of Moll, who urges that detumescence is primal, strikes hands with the idea so current among youth of to-day, especially if depraved, that the glands must be dis- charged and their secretion eliminated from the system. This vulgar concept is as unsatisfactory scientifically as it has been devastating morally; it has been not only the excuse but the incentive to immeasurable vice, and has aided to an enormously exaggerated idea of the difficulties of continence. The very fact, brought out so clearly by Guinard 2 and others, that cas- tration, especially after mature age, often does not lessen but may even increase the desire, is because in man, the latter, being 1 See L'Instinct Sexuel. Paris, 1899.
1 Dictionnaire de Physiol., art. Castration.
ADOLESCENT LOVE