of the best arguments for its post-mortem existence, but these were never appreciated save for the person of Christ. Thus, while the body might come in part from the parent, every soul was a newly made thing with no history. It was, in its own nature, outside the current of heredity, but was corrupted by contact with the sinful body through which it was dragged down unless rescued by a special redemptive work. The focus of all interest in the soul was thus, how to insure its salvation hereafter.
The ethical value of the idea of a future life of rewards and punishments has, of course, been incalculable. If it has brought in cosmo-heteronymous motives of morality unknown to the Stoics and disallowed by Kant; if it has sometimes en- gendered a transcendental selfishness that may become gross, and in neurotic ages, races, or persons, favored fears and anx- ieties that were hysterical; if formal, external, and even me- chanical ways and means of salvation have often been relied on — all these things concern us here only as products and illus- trations of the evils of a too exclusive interest in the soul's FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 43 future, which is, in fact, still unknowable save to faith, and of excessive neglect of its past, which is really now increasingly accessible and which is proverbially the best means of judging of its future.
One striking example of the havoc which this lust to pierce the secrets of the future makes with science is seen in the Eng- lish Psychic Research Society. It has collected masses of precious and hitherto neglected border-land phenomena between waking and sleep, sanity and insanity, on trancoidal states, automatisms of body and mind, illusions, hypnotism, etc. But almost the sole interest of this large and cultured society in these data is what contribution they make to what its able leader calls " the most insistent question of the human heart, If a man die, shall he live again? " Is there a land of disembodied spir- its, and can communication be established and demonstrated between them and us? Possession, apparitions, phantoms of the dead, messages from the ghost world, or transcendental as well as mundane telepathy, and in general an inductive demon- stration of a survival of the soul after death, are thus the themes or conclusions, directly or indirectly, inspiring all this work.1 Now the folly and pathos of all this is that every fact and group of facts relied on point for their explanation directly and only to the past of the individual or the race and not to the future, to the ab- and sub- and not to the super-normal, or perhaps to the body even more than to the spirit. Greatly indebted as our guild is for facts, suggestive apercus, and new interests to these students, their service is, as I have elsewhere tried to point out in some detail,2 not unlike that of alchemists who sought the elixir of life for chemistry, of astrologists in quest of the influence of the stars on human life for astronomy, and just as the desire to locate heaven and faith in planetary in- fluences and modes of attaining physical immortality had to be cast out of these fields before science could really do its great work in them, so similar purgation must be made here.
How profoundly contemporary psychologists and philoso- phers of the highest academic rank, even those who shrink from 1 See Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, by F. W. H. Myers.
2 See my fuller exposition of these points in the Am. Jour, of Psy., vol. vii, 44 TMK PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE all such extreme conclusions, -no influenced by this bias, con- sciously or unconsciously, in the deeper motivations of their work, its direction, methods, and conclusions, we see on every hand. One professor of great learning and acumen has been apparently almost unpi voted by the prolonged and acute study of the revelations of a noted trance medium, which he is con- vinced are from relatives in the spirit world. Another profound and acute leader of American metaphysical thought attains as his consummate conclusion the conviction of an eternal world of many monadic minds or selves, in a republic or city of God, the free members of which control the natural world and are the sources of all its law. The supreme fact in his \vorld is " the eternal reality of the individual." Creation itself is not an event, but a symbol, and these personal spirits never fully and completely enter the real world, for they are out of time and of the chain of causality. Another of no less power and eminence makes the goal of philosophy the demonstration of an individuality deeper, more permanent, and real than that of persons as they appear to us, because knowledge and love are stronger than life, and so, if our nature is not a lie, the actuality of our dead friends transcends sense. Such instances might be multiplied. The great majority of people, expert as well as lay, think and speak of soul in the future tense, and to very few does the word suggest any connotation with the past. Ask the very man on the street what he thinks of the soul, and he assumes that you speak of another life or of preparation for it.
II. This proleptic and sometimes almost cataleptic interest in the soul's future has also been a deep psychological motive in most of the vast body of discussions, past and present, on the relations of the mind and body, and the aversion to even any very close association between the two is inveterate. Dr. McCosh held that the student of psychology must, at the out- set, strip the idea of soul of every material metaphor. It is independent of time and space, has no place, age, form, etc. Paulsen says in his introduction, " thoughts are not in the brain; one can just as w-ell say that they are in the stomach or in the moon, etc." For James, the brain obstructs thought like a bad conductor. " Our brains are thin, half-transparent places in the veil," through which the great life of soul " breaks FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 45 into this world in all sorts of restricted forms." Elsewhere he makes purgation of the body by urging with unusual fervor that sex has nothing whatever to do with the psychology of religion, which is in fact a hollow and, to quite an extent, an unreal thing without it. Soul and body are opposed and con- trasted at every point. This tendency is a well-preserved tra- dition of idealism. Descartes, its modern advocate, thought mind and matter had nothing in common, and his successors thought them only externally attached. Even volition, in order to affect the body, and sensation, to give knowledge of things, must go through God as a mediating tertium quid. So began the tragic \var between the ego and its object, and the terms of truce drawn up by Kant and his successors, under whose influence the problem of the perception and the possibility of knowing the external \vorld has been worked out, have for many generations been the focus of all interest in the world of soul, and the process of dissolving the objective world has become an academic cult that plays on the dreameries of adolescence and robs it of zest, vigor, and faith. It is a mental tonic, but sterilizes the heart and paralyzes the will. Incom- mensurability is their postulate, not unity, and just now even psychologists are addicted to making subtle but utterly scholas- tic distinctions between theories of parallelism and interaction, with arguments I would far rather be refuted by than use. These thinkers constitutionally resist every important, trans- forming, and formative norm or principle that is offered to psychology from any department of physical science, for which they affect to legislate methods and lay down limitations on high a priori grounds. What can brute matter tell us of its lofty partner, mind? It must rather be held up and brought to its haunches like Plato's dark steed, and dualism is pushed to its uttermost in every domain.
Ultra idealism I hold to be pathological, and hypertrophied self-consciousness to be at least in part and perhaps essentially a remedial process, but it is now so drastic that many succumb under it. It may in part be grossly and physiologically described as premature excessive development of associative activities over those of the projection system which mediates sensation and motion. Modern man at best has lost much keenness of sense and his motor life tends to caducity. His muscles are 4-6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE flabby from disuse, and efferent stimuli are long-circuited to cerebral activities instead of being reflected at once to motion. As sight becomes dominant, touch, the mother sense, which alone gives the most inexpugnable sense of reality, retires in favor of a paper currency of visual experience, and thus, as is inevitable, those who subject themselves long to this discipline feel a little removed from the basal properties of matter.1 The eye-minded man is perhaps more predisposed to idealism than the practical, motor-minded type. The blind have the most unfaltering sense of the reality of the external world because they are nearer the original tangible form in which reality was first given. An age of wealth, too, withdraws from the stern struggle for existence which most impresses objectivity. For thinkers by profession, especially if they are not men of science, who are withdrawn from the palpitating interests of literature or social life and politics, sheltered and isolated still more by a fixed and assured salary in old, endowed, respectable, but uninspected institutions, segregated in the study, so that knowledge of life and nature comes not even from the labora- tory, but from the pallid, second-hand source of books, await- ing in this environment the time of life when youthful exuberance of not only sense and motion but even of passion begins to abate, fed upon the literature of Hindu, Greek, and German idealism rather than upon science — for such the whole physical universe and the world of 'throbbing life and action is pretty sure to fade and the inner world of thought to become all in all. Having attained, by whatever processes, the settled convic- tion that matter is non-being, that the rich, booming cosmos is may a or illusion, mere eject, project, possibility of sensation, thing-in-itself, etc., and that even its receptacles, time and space, are only subjective forms, there comes as the first result an elation and exaltation that nothing else, unless it be paranoia or certain drugs, can give. Mind is supreme, has come to its own kingdom, can not respect itself too highly as the cosmo- thetic creator and bearer of the universe. And now comes, in- terpolated between Berkeley and Hume, where this develop - 1 See a suggestive argument on this point by A. Fraser, on Visualization as the Chief Source of the Psychology of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and an- other on the Foundation of Natural Realism which he thinks to be touch. Am. Jour, of Psychol., vol. iv, pp. 230, 429. See also ch. xvi, § vii (a).
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 47 ment stage should be both in the genetic and pedagogic order, for they are its inevitable Nemesis, the great romantic period of philosophizing. The soul, or rather one of its forms of ac- tivity, speculative reason, proceeds to recreate from within or posit the world, and to read a new title clear to what sense had lost. It is all will and idea, or, Froschammer thinks, imagina- tion; the real and rational are identical. Nature is derived, evolved, construed. The pantheistic soul of the individual, the oracle of the world soul, the sole mouthpiece of God, itself transcendent, is given a rank and dignity unprecedented in many ways, even by preexistence theories, and the personal soul of the thinker becomes a parvus in suo genere deus, the organ of all the categories, and its self-consciousness is deemed the blossom of all the world processes, with conscience the vicegerent of the Divine, conviction immediate, the certainty of reason almost convulsive, re-revealing religion, etc. This, too, is the stage of the great postulates, Platonic myths of a transcendental self, a world soul that creates by thinking, a supernal will that is energy, ideas that are archetypal, a con- science that is autonomous and absolute, etc.
But this ravishing interlude is soon seen to rest only on a "transcendental subreption" in the Avernian progress of Carte- sian doubt. Hume long before had taken the inevitable next step; the ego itself must go the way of the external world. We can truly know only states of mind, and every inference, not only of the existence of matter, of souls in animals and other men, but of any subjective reality, is unwarranted by rigid epistemological thinking that must be content to replow and crossplow the same old fields of adult consciousness without attempting to clear new land and bring it under cultivation. The only possible logical conclusion is the nihilism of Gorgias. Nothing exists; if something did exist, we could not know it, and if we knew anything, we could not tell it. We must doubt even that we doubt, and may do this doubting the new doubt indefinitely. The solipsistic involucre ends at last with only at most the mental content of the present flitting moment, with every inference to the reality not only of nature but of the doubter, or even of other of his own states of mind not on the instant present, denied, and so instead of a glorious soul there remains only an inner void. There is no other goal for the 4& THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE rigorous thinker, who has the courage of his convictions, than to push on to this utter bankruptcy and abortion. Few have the hardihood to take the extreme step, but many have had their mental eyeballs seared by coming within sight of this hell of complete skepticism and agnosticism. All such are thereafter changed beings. The zest of life has faded as by precocious senescence, so that they are a little aloof, Mahatmas, who can never love, hate, enjoy nature and life without reserve, and they can no longer live quite like those who have never ex- perienced the great disenchantment. With a sense of superior insight has come aridity of heart, and the intellect has enfeebled the will. Few things are worth doing with enthusiasm and abandon, unless it be to devise ways of escape, and to this some, especially academic teachers, address themselves.1 I believe this law to be valid and often illustrated, viz., that, other things being equal, the more rigorously and extremely the logic of doubt has been applied in one's personal experience, the more desperate the salto mortale he is prone to make to escape. Those who have gone very far, may have recourse to some very satu- rated form of religious orthodoxy, or spiritism in some of its less crass modern forms, while those who have for any reason paused midway on the downward road tend to have recourse to the great postulates of romantic philosophy described in the last paragraph.
Now such an experience, or indeed any very long, serious and sympathetic work with extreme idealism and epistemology, generally disqualifies for whole-souled work in any science, and most of all in psychology considered as a natural science. Such thinkers often attempt objective, inductive work in the laboratory, clinic, etc., and often make brilliant suggestions, but if it does not lack true scientific quality and show signs of being amateurish and merely non-a vocational, this work is peculiarly prone to be upon speculative or insoluble questions or to be marked by defective rigor of method, so that one great need, especially now and in this country, is an effective demar- cation between psychology as a science of nature and as a 1 See my College Philosophy, Forum, June, 1900, where I have tried to describe the epistemological processes now in vogue of first losing the soul and then find- ing a way of salvation.
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 49 branch of philosophy. Thus much of what is now called psy- chology is half speculative philosophy, and if not hermaphrodite and mongrel, as every editor in this field knows, much that is offered it has at least the mark of hybridity, i.e., sterility, so that large as it is now, it can have no future save in history as a new type of scholasticism. Genetic psychology is still more alien to the epistemologists, because they have their own pseudogenesis of mind in the realm of speculation and intro- spection.1 III. A third obstacle which genetic psychology encounters has an instructive analogue in that which Darwinism had to overcome in the wide-spread and almost inexpugnable convic- tion that the study of living forms consisted in defining and classifying genera and species, and that these were fixed and intransmutable one. into the other, and therefore, if the devel- opment theory were established, instead of being near its goal, biology would be shown to be really just beginning and the very bases of classification thought to be established would be seen to be many of them artificial. So psychogenesis seems utterly lawless to most of the philosophers, even those who also affect psychology. It has little respect for the narrow limits they assign it and ignores their carefully laid down boundaries. It knows and claims its own in logic, metaphysics, ethics, religion, and pedagogy, in a way that perturbs the cartographer and tab- ulator of all the fields of human knowledge. The philosophic type of mind can do nothing without definitions at the start; the psychologist is content to describe and shrinks from defin- ing at all, at least, save at the end. The philosopher has his ste- reotyped and conventionalized pigeon-holes — idealism, realism, materialism, dogmatism, skepticism, positivism, intuitionalism, empiricism, and the rest, and if he is above the partizanship that uses the isms not his own as epithets, he classifies all think- ers, ancient and contemporary, under one or another, bring- ing these distinctions into the foreground as introductory or propaedeutic courses, of which we have now so many illustra- tions in current text-books and courses. The psychologist, 1 See an exquisite illustration in Judd's Genetic Psychology for Teachers, New York, 1903, which decries all genetic evolution save only that which comes from the analysis of self-consciousness.
5° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE holding that all thinking men are all of these in differing pro- portion and are any one of them at most, as it were, only by a small majority, if they are not dwarfed or maimed, would, in teaching, bring his pupils into a relation of sympathetic appre- ciation with each standpoint without bias or partiality; both to this end and also for pedagogic reasons, he defines and differ- entiates these standpoints only after a broad basis of knowl- edge has made them by turns, though unconsciously, but as wholly as possible, critics, pessimists, optimists, ontologists, phenomenologists, materialists, idealists, and all the rest.
Oken's organosophy, assuming that animals are but fetal forms of man, classified radiates as intestinal, annelids as res- piratory, fishes as osseous, amphibia as muscular, birds as nerv- ous animals, etc., calling each a crystallized thought or word of God. Most philosophical classifications of systems, human faculties and departments, and even sciences, are equally prone to magnify one prominent part or function till it becomes the chief or sole mark — an error that induction has long described and warned against as due to underestimating the complexity of nature, life, and mind. Theologians hold that men are either Christians, fetish worshipers, Buddhists, Mohammed- ans, Confucianists, etc., but the psychology of religion shows that the individual who has a full and normal development is essentially several, if not many or even all of these in turn, or even at one and the same time.1 So in philosophy, age, mood, culture-stage, perhaps sex, demand a differing succession of isms already beginning to be slowly made out. Childhood is sensual, materialistic, very dualistic; youth, ideal, optimistic; manhood, realistic, positivistic; and pessimism and especially epistemology are essentially the fit philosophy of old age if of any period of life. The history of philosophy teaches that the mono-ideistic thinkers, who lived a lifetime in one system and who are the types in whom the schematizers delight, either stiffened in the mold by precociously formulating and defining their ideas too early in life, ably defending in maturity the posi- tion to which they chose to commit themselves with insufficient orientation in youth, or else were the victims of an environment or an age itself overwrought, one-sided, and extreme. Growth, 1 See Jean Du Buy. Five Great Religions as Stages of Development, fin press.) Also ch. xiv.
FEELINGS AND PSYCHIC EVOLUTION 51 on the other hand, is essentially non-logical and forever incon- sistent with itself. The logic of the schools is ex post facto. It follows after achievement and discovery, and at best tells a little of how mind has achieved its triumphs in the past, warns of errors, but it never either guided or inspired new steps. Plato and Kant showed genetic progress despite the rigor of their reasoning, and Schelling is still more instructive to the geneticist, for he molted successive systems of.thought, as to some extent did Lotze and Fichte, although their meta- morphoses were limited in both range and number. That some day psychology will be able to give us, in place of the crude phenomenologies and abstract constructions of the history of philosophy from Hegel to our day, a true genetic, natural his- tory of normal stages in human development, using systems as human documents, sgmewhat as it now uses returns from chil- dren, is a new, if yet a little dreamy, possibility, which, when it is realized as it is sure to be sometime, will give a larger range to our pilgrim's progress through life. If this ever be, there will be not one Zarathustra, but several, and perhaps many vari- eties, and they will not exemplify the present types of philosophy as laid down in our introductions, but the psychology of each will include all, only with characteristic diversities of emphasis.
IV. All three of these tendencies contribute to what is nevertheless in some sense a distinct and fourth obstacle to genetic psychology, viz., the disposition to regard animals as well as defectives, savages, and children as too remote from the life of adult culture to shed much light upon the mature mind.
(a) There is a chasm, variously defined, deepened between us and primitive people by prejudices which very few are able to overcome, and recognize lower ethnic strata sympathetically at their true worth.1 ' To know a typical savage is to love and respect him," is the sentiment often expressed as the result of long intimacy. They are only children and adolescents of mature years, if unspoiled by civilization, with far more vigor- ous bodies and often purer lives than ours, and perhaps in- tended as relays to take up the burden of the world's progress 1 See my article on The Relations between Lower and Higher Races. Proa Mass. Hist. Soc., January, 1903. Also chap, xviii.
52 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE on the center of the historic stage when we have gone the way of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Without knowing them and their ways, we can not understand children, religion, or educa- tion, our own earlier history or that of our institutions. Man was no doubt far longer in their state than they have been in ours. We have had too little sympathy with the anthropol- ogy of myth, custom, and belief, which, great as its achieve- ments are, has won little academic recognition in curricula, examinations, and degrees, and with which the philosoph- ical psychologists fail to connect. Students of the soul should be students of man, and the unanthropological character of American psychology is not only un-American, but scien- tifically so unnatural that it must be transient. Field work here has a disciplinary and broadening effect, now one of the most urgent needs of our too cloistered and sequestered work, but to the speculative type of mind this seems remote, too purely objective and hard. It is precisely psychological study that is most needed for these vanishing races if we would truly know ourselves, and only a profound conviction of the validity and the value of psychic evolution can give the right motiva- tion to this work.