Our knowledge of the true genetic order is yet very imper- 1 See my Love and Study of Nature. The Agriculture of Mass., 1898, pp. 134- 152 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE feet, but we now see the method by which it is to be developed. This is (a) by studying children in large numbers, (b) by combining from available sources a composite picture of race development on analogous lines. These processes should be largely independent of each other, and then (c) comes the task of comparison, using each as the key to the other, which should give a record of development more complete than either alone could afford. The phyletic series will show much full-blown that in the child series only buds. Most of the evolved prod- ucts in the former will not be hard to identify with the rudi- ments of the latter series. Next (d) we must decide which of the last should be left to the progressive atrophy now taking place, and which need to be more completely lived out either for their own sake or to furnish the momentum of interest necessary for achieving the next higher stage of life. Here we shall find that many of the best impulsions in our nature are thwarted so that youth is arrested in many of its choicest prom- ises and potencies by adverse conditions of modern life, social, industrial, educational, and religious, and shall realize the pathos and tragedy of aborted powers so that the adult is sometimes but the torso of what he would be were the unsuspected possibilities of youth fulfilled. Instead of entering upon the full, rich life of the race which is our heritage, which is the only meaning of the grand old ideal of a humanistic and truly liberal education, and lingering as long as possible in the para- dise of unfallen man, that the individual may enlarge itself as far as possible toward the dimensions of his species, there is a veritable rage for prematurity, for precociously assuming adult burdens, airs, indocilities, and callousness. If there is a sin against the Holy Ghost it is dishonoring one's own or an- other's youth. Next comes (e) the task of deciding which of all the profuse buds of talent and genius most need expression in each individual; and last (f) we must determine what men- tal pabulum, and how curriculized and how given, makes it most effective for our ends. Here many of the garbs of culture long since outgrown and discarded by mature sci- ence will be found of inestimable value. Science itself arose by working over and over to ever more refined forms old nature myths, and to some extent, in a true pedagogy, youth must repeat the process.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 153 Vast as is the work that yet remains to be done in this field, a few basal principles can be already roughly outlined. In general the child's reactions to nature are either directly sen- sory or crudely practical for work and play.
I. Adolescence marks the rise of the first sentimental re- sponse, the best first expression of which is myth, poetry, or the religions of nature. Familiarity with and love of these interpretations should be diligently and systematically fostered. Their possibilities both as genetic introductions and later as relays of scientific interest are as great as they are unrealized, and literary anthologies for reading courses should be gathered into courses related to each of the great sciences where litera- ture exists; that it does not in all is both a defect of letters and a misfortune for youth, all the sadder because crude mythic ore awaiting synthesis 'and modern literary expression is so accessible in the field of every leading branch of science.
II. Next in the genetic order comes popular science, also well developed in some and so defective in other lines. Per- haps it will some day be brought home to every eminent inves- tigator that a new discovery, besides its technical record, in- volves the added duty of concise and lucid popular statement of it as a tribute to youth. In the quality, amount, and grouping of this material the wise teacher in every branch will have deep concern. Here, too, belongs every contact which science can suggest with the daily life of the pupil at home or school, at play or resting, in dress and regimen, and here, too, begins the need of abundant apparatus, models, diagrams, collections, and all aids that eye or hand can give the mind. A science building or course without these is a soulless corpse. The heroes and history epochs of each branch add another needed quality to the still so largely humanistic stage.
III. Then, and not earlier, come the need of utilities, ap- plication to machinery, hygiene, commerce, processes of manu- facture, the bread-winning worth of nature knowledge, how its forces are harnessed to serve man and to produce values. Contrary to common educational theory and practise, the prac- tical, technological side of science should precede its purer forms. Here belong economic botany and zoology, the help- fulness of astronomy, the inventions that follow in the wake of discovery, machinery, and engineering novelties based on 49 154 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE researches — or, in a word, how man has made nature work for him.
IV. Last and highest comes pure science freed from all alloy of myth, genetic stage or utility, and cultivated for its own sake, with no motive but love of truth.
Of many illustrations of the current ignorance and neglect of genetic principles and its sad results, I here select but one. Of all the sciences that deal with the physical universe, physics may now be called one of the chief. In antiquity it was the science of nature from which many branches have sprung. It conditions, perhaps, man's most fundamental views about his world. In all the history of science its chapter is one of the most imposing, its recent growth astounding, its applications and utilities most fruitful, its promise for the future brightest, and its disciplinary value unexcelled. It is easier to teach to large numbers in the city than the biological sciences, although far less germane to girls than to boys in the middle teens. Its pedagogic history, too, under various names is some two cen- turies old. As natural philosophy it has been for nearly three generations the chief, quite commonly the only, science taught in secondary schools. Despite all this, it seems now from some points of view well along in the stages of educational decadence.1 Probably less than eight per cent of all the boy pupils in our high schools are now studying physics. This progressive neglect or aversion to physics has gone on, despite the best fostering care of colleges, its high place among en- trance requirements, the great ability with which it has been taught in the high schools by aid of the nearly two score new texts which I have collected. Everything that expert knowl- edge, that the authority that works from above downward, that the advocates of unity and enrichment, that the laboratories and methods could do, has been attempted, but the same decline of physics is widespread among colleges. Now as this subject has been given such a prominent role as the typical science intended to lead to the introduction of others, this status is especially deplorable for the new education in science, and has given the advocates of Latin, English, mathematics, and 1 See my Address before the New England Association of Physics Teachers, Boston Proceedings, May 24, 1902.
ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 155 modern languages — courses in all of which have increased greatly and all the pupils in which far outnumber if not far more than double those of physics — grounds against the intro- duction of science in the high schools, which some of them have used with great effect. Something is very wrong. What is it?
It needs no special knowledge of psychics, but of something outside and just as real, to see that the cause lies in the neglect and the violence done to the nature and needs of the youthful soul by the present methods and matters.
1. Boys in their teens have a veritable passion for the stories of great men, and the heroology of physics, which if rightly applied might generate a momentum of interest that would even take them through the course as laid out, should find a place. Here again we must see that, as with mechanical so with psychic force, it must be generated over a large area if it is to be applied intensively at a single point. Physics has its saints and martyrs and devotees, its dramatic incidents and epochs, its struggles with superstition, its glorious triumphs; and a judicious seasoning, perhaps, of the whole course with a few references and reports, with choice material from this field, would do much. Moreover, the historic sense is awaken- ing in these fields, giving a present sense of achievement and progress, and nothing appeals to the young more than to feel vividly the sense of growth.
2. The half-score of text-books in physics I have glanced over seem essentially quantitative, require great exactness, and are largely devoted to precise measurements, with too much and too early insistence on mathematics. Teachers in this field have a sense that mathematics is the only proper language of this science. The topics are no doubt admirably chosen, their sequence the best from a logical standpoint, and they are such models of condensation and enrichment that it seems to the organizer and to the specialist alike almost perversion that our youth pass it by. But boys of this age want more dynamics. Like Maxwell when a youth, they are chiefly interested in the " go " of things. Recent statistics of boys' general reading in our public libraries show that they were but little interested in much especially prepared for them, like the Youth's Com- panion and St. Nicholas, but that the Scientific American and I56 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE its Supplement led all the rest. The boys with aptitudes for physics want to understand how engines, machinery, perhaps especially dynamos, work. I have known some greatly inter- ested in the Patent reports; but everything to really appeal to them must move. In Germany there are many toys that might be called scientific. Hence, too, the fascination with which, in my school days, we delighted in lectures and demonstra- tions with very crude and often home-made illustrative appa- ratus, which a clever teacher devised and set up for us. This exactness which involved applying mathematics came very late in the history of physics. Even Tyndall, and more yet before his day, knew little of this and never used it in classes, but were most inspiring teachers who powerfully evoked thought and were not affected by the modern rage to apply mathematics to the boy's brain processes, even by marking his examinations and recitations.
3. I must confess myself a convert to the dire heresy that in this field, and in some others, very much thoroughness and perfection violates the laws of youthful nature and of growth. The normal boy in the teens is essentially in the popular science age. He wants and needs great wholes, facts in profusion, but few formulae. He would go far to see scores and hundreds of demonstrative experiments made in physics, and would like to repeat them in his own imperfect and perhaps even clumsy way without being bothered by equations. He is often a walk- ing interrogation-point about ether, atoms, X-rays, nature of electricity, motors of many kinds, with a native gravity of his mind toward those frontier questions where even the great masters know as little as he. He is in the questioning age, but wants only answers that are vague, brief, but above all suggestive; and in all this he is true to the great law that the development of the individual in any line of culture tends to repeat the history of the race in that field.
4. Last, and perhaps most important of all for our purpose to-day, the high school boy is in the stage of beginning to be a utilitarian. The age of pure science has not come for him, but applications, though not logically first, precede in the order of growth and interest the knowledge of laws, forms, and abstractions. He would know how the trolley, how wired and wireless telegraphy work, and the steam engine, the applica- ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 157 tions of mechanics in the intricate mechanisms, almost any of even the smaller straps and buckles in the complex harnesses science has put upon natural force, charm him. Physics in the field, the street, the shop, the factory, the great triumphs of engineering skill, civil, mining, mechanical, inventions in their embryo stage, processes, aerial navigation, power devel- oped from waves, vortexes, molecules, atoms, all these things which make man's reaction to nature a wonder book, should be open to him; and, in frequent conversations and copious infor- mation, we should arouse his imagination, for this is the organ of the heart and opens up the way for reason. The boyhood of the great makers of physics and astronomy, who have found out and opened a natural way for their own genius, is a lesson which most teachers of physics, I fear, have not enough profited by. The subject-matter of their curriculum is too condensed, too highly peptonized for healthful assimilation; and we are too prone to forget that we can only accelerate nature's way, but never short-circuit it without violence.
The influence of the college professors of physics and their text-books has in the last decade or two been a stimulus of very great value in elevating standards, but this work now, in my opinion, has been overdone, and the time has come when high-school teachers should assert their independence and make adjustments to a stage of youthful interest, of which the col- lege professor knows little. High-school physics has problems all its own to which its representatives should address them- selves with courage, resolution, and above all with independ- ence, or else the present decadent tendencies, more due to college control through the undue influence of examinations and standards than to them, will continue, and with it the sci- entific movement, of which it is in a sense a pioneer, will suffer still more.
Toy museums, exhibitions, and even congresses in Europe, are very instructive here. Bugs that flutter and creep, birds that fly, peck, and sing; monkeys, soldiers, boats, dolls, bal- loons, engines that move, are often, especially in Germany, masterpieces of mechanical simplification and cheapness illustrat- ing fundamental principles. Many of these things could be made as manual training adjuncts, and the best boys' books, like Cassell, Baker, Beard, Routledge, Peper, and also books I58 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE on magic, like Hoffman and Hopkins, would be helpful in teaching problems of the lever, balance, wedge, pulley, pump, monochord, whistle, prisms, small lenses easily ground by boys, magic lanterns, kaleidoscope, telegraph, etc., which the normal boy would approach with a full head-pressure of interest. Glass work, the equipment of which with a little stock of tubes, blowpipes, bellows, tools, and annealing oven, occupies no more space. than a sewing machine, including the making of thermometers, all this gives a manual discipline for hand and eye comparable to learning the piano. Tops of many kinds are an open sesame into the very heart of science and suggest and illustrate some of the profoundest principles from ions and electrons to stellar systems. Box kites that penetrate the clouds and the secrets of humidity, temperature, velocity, pressure, perhaps with photographic attachments, rest on a soil of strong native interest. Where work that the boy has made with his own hands goes, there his interest follows. An inner eye opens, skill with fingers is harnessed to the development of cerebral neurons, and we work in the depths and not in the shadows of the soul. In Europe photography is often curriculized, and in Vienna the magnificent imperial school devoted to it is visited. At the Besangon school of horology, vibrations, springs, synchronization, etc., are taught, and at the famous Ecole du Livre, where everything pertaining to book- making is learned, pupils are taught many principles of physics. Each one of these topics has a choice little literature, as does rubber work and soldering. Suffering as school physics is from lack of concreteness, application, and appeals to the motor element, and still more maimed as manual training is for lack of intellectual ingredients, the present divorce of the two is a strange and surely transient anomaly.
The humanistic stage and aspect of science has been pro- gressively ignored. If the old nature religions had persisted, or if it could be now recognized that childhood and youth still tend to live through them in a way that both the higher relig- ions that worship man and the mechanism of science intim- idate and repress to the great loss of both, all would be very different. To me the faint beginnings that are now being made to recover some of our losses here, appeal as a new enthu- siasm of humanity, as a restoration from a dire fall that has ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 159 been so gradual that we do not realize it, and so all-sided that the very standards of comparison are all in various stages of decay. The Renaissance recreated Europe by restoring a rela- tively recent age and stage of man's development. History seeks to conserve for present uses the lessons of the past. Prot- estant culture seeks to go back to Scripture and restore by the spade and textual criticism the consciousness of Jesus and the nascent stages of the new life that came into and transformed the world through Him and His early followers. Now that education would guide and improve all earlier and later stages of development, it must no longer limit its lesson to the short period of authentic history, but profit by and even incite by new motives every new method of retracing ever earlier stages of the soul's evolution. Happily, it is now beginning to shape a larger and all-comprehensive humanism and renaissance full of new promise for the future of the race.
In what follows I can only very briefly glance at some of the great fields of natuie interest, following a general evolu- tionary order rather than that of psychogenetic zest, which is so far less determined, and having regard chiefly to adolescence only.
I. One of the new psychic developments of this age is a great and sometimes sudden extension of interest in space and time. Childhood cares little for what is remote in either order unless associated with some personal object. Inversely as the squares of the distances is one of its most characteristic laws of interest, for it lives chiefly in the present. But it would almost seem from our returns that every well-endowed youth, before or very soon after the age of twenty, has an infinity neurosis concerning space and time, which is more or less spe- cific and is often at first perhaps chiefly automatic and instinctive, but unique and heretofore little known. While it fascinates, it soothes and quiets. Some become specialists in sky-gazing and dreaming and think along, visiting worlds full of wonders, or the arch above may seem a wall which shuts out the soul as though it never could get through, or it may become a shuddering menace of extinction and annihilation, while some are so updrawn that the heavens and the soul seem to belong to each other. Some have distinct agoraphobia at the thought of spatial infinity, and steady themselves by think- 160 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ing that the stellar worlds are oases scattered at distances that are not really too great to be a little neighborly, while the claus- trophobiac type of mind is relieved to find open spaces in a star map, so that escape is not cut off, or are glad to hear of ether instead of a void, for it seems a way of exit or makes getting to heaven easier. Some muse on whether there can really be either a mathematical or a gravity center in the universe and associate these thoughts with constant falling and a sinking feeling. Some think the universe laminated in a Dantesque way or growing a layer at a time. Others feel that space opens to infinity easiest toward some one point of compass, usually eastward, or at a certain angle of elevation where the world came from or where God is still creating worlds. Others think out in one direction until they are fatigued or repelled, and then in the opposite. Some have a persistent longing or drawing toward the east, south, or west, or right up to the sky, where they would float on forever. Some fancy limits, then transcend them, and count off and must measure time and space by each other. Some pity the loneliness of the earth, the solar system, or the stars so far from each other, with no communication.
Some reflect that void space might be either light or dark and it would make no difference. The lapse of time is so doom-like going on to the end. Some must stop the tick of the clock or turn it back. Some are " frozen stiff " and gasp at these attacks, and all the snugness and comfort of life seem gone. What can God do with all this space and time? Some are faint, others angry, to hear talk suggesting their creepy " spells." Does it get lighter, darker, emptier, hotter, or colder away out there? Is it spherical or oblate, etc.? To many these thoughts are immediately associated with ideas of the soul's future, while to others it is all more abstract and mathematical. Not one of our returns even suggested the subjectivity of time and space, except where there had been specific instruction in philosophy.1 1F., 17. At thirteen began to realize eternity and think on the end of time, space, and the world. This brought a feeling of weakness and palpitation and made her serious and thoughtful. She developed a ritual of Bible verses, hymns, etc., for such occasions.
M., 23. Thought space might be dotted all over with stars, and if it was infinite ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 161 We glimpse here perhaps the motives of the Yogi cult of absorption in the absolute or universal, and of the worship of Varuna, or Uranus, of which diffusing smoke and incense was and the light of them all could reach us, that no matter how far apart they were the sky would seem a solid floor of light, and wondered if he went to the farthest star they would still seem uniformly thick on all sides. (Cf. Eternity, by W. M. Bryant, pp. 36-37, for a somewhat similar reverie.)
F., 27. Thinks of infinite space as intensely alive, tingling and vibrating with activity. Worlds and stars are dross or precipitations, and souls are finer extracts of their cosmic life far more intense than theirs. Matter is the same, only lower and more degraded.
M., 27. Thinks all people worry about infinite time and space sometimes, and that it is well to have it early and in a chicken-pox form so as not to be befuddled by Kant. Space is round with the earth at the center, and the thought of forever falling affects his heart.
M., 25. When I gaze at the sky and think of the immensities and infinitudes, I feel like a microbe and could no more have the conceit to say their esse is percipi (though I could do this with ease and pleasure in my room at college) than I could conceive a protozoan saying this universe consists of me. Very likely the gods or real beings out there could not see us with a microscope if the sun itself was a lens made on purpose. If they can, they must laugh.
M., 24. If space is really infinite and populated with stars all through, I could not see how there could be any common center, or any absolute gravity, or abso- lute motion. Again, if every movement of every being started vibrations that irra- diate outward forever, the acts of my boyhood must now be present by continuity of vibration at some far-off point, and thus everything that ever happened is some- where present forever in irradiating spheres, and thus if there be a universal senso- rium everything is forever present to it.
F., 25. I am a strong believer in cremation, because I like the idea of having the body given a speedy gaseous diffusion as wide as possible. The poetic idea of products of my body coloring a sunset ever so little appeals to me; besides, I had rather be gas and vapor than clay and earth which ordinary inhumation suggests, because the former seems somehow more akin to spirit, as the latter does to matter.
M., 20. When I get hypnotized by gazing at the sky and stars, I think my pre- dominant feeling is a desire to explore, to float up and travel all around and visit many stars and get to the limit and look off into empty starless space in some sort of a wild Jules Verne trip, and I often fancy schemes of rapid interstellar transit in my idle sky-dreamings.
M., 21. After much thought, once reached this notion, that starting with a row of small figure nines reaching to the farthest star and back and then looping through all the other stars and back, then letting each unit represented in this immense number stand for all the smallest particles in the universe, and letting each of these particles stand for a decillion miles, he reflected that when he had traveled all these miles beyond the farthest star he would have only just started through infinite space. Later he thought each unit might stand for all the distance light could travel in all these years, and then that each particle in the universe should be placed at the end of the distance light could travel in them all, etc.
1 62 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the symbol, and from which the various theories of pantheistic anatheosis were unfolded. But there is no suggestion of get- ting beyond or outside of time and space. Now the mind is expanded and finds repose in the nebulae hypothesis, as formerly the quietism of the heart was attained in Nirvana. The modern dreamer wants to be pulverized or reduced back to his stoichio- logical bases, like Jeffries perhaps, by fire burial, as the panthe- istic soul which felt itself as intensive as space is extensive, and would relapse to the void out of which it was formed. To those who aspire to be " sunk in the changeless calm " of an impersonal deity, the only truly nihilistic atheism is to deny the void, but the infinite void is real, and to affirm its over- whelming positive character is the supreme affirmation of faith. Modern psychology knows no hint of an explanation why the adolescent soul seeks perhaps to cool passion, as it is still taught to do in India by the cult of sitting cross-legged and saying " om "; or why it gravitates so strongly at this age to think sub specie atertinatis, or to fall into this " lair " of Eckhart, unless there really be some " impulse of return," as Proclus and Plotinus said, by contemplation toward the