Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/848

 832 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

rational. Hence the difficulty of discussing the subject before a popular audience: it is still too subjective and personal. But we are beginning to get a rational view of the subject in the biological study of germination and reproduction in the laboratory.

" The dawn of adolescence is marked by a special consciousness of sex. Young people are psychologically in the condition of Adam and Eve when they first knew that they were naked. There is a special kind of sex-shame hitherto unknown." There is an enhanced bodily consciousness, even a clothes-consciousness. " The boy sud- denly realizes that his shoes are not blacked, or his coat is worn and dirty, or his hair unbrushed." " Sex is the most potent and magic open sesame to the deepest mysteries of life, death, religion, and love. It is, therefore, one of the cardinal sins against youth to repress healthy thoughts of sex at the proper age." Each sex is now in a sense the making of the other. " Each sex is more inclined to develop the best qualities peculiar to itself in the presence of the other." " It is the age of erectile diathesis." " The erethism that is now so increased in the sexual parts is probably more or less so in nearly every organ and tissue." There is a hunger for orgasms.

To shout and put forth the utmost possible strength in crude ways is an crethic intoxication at a stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood-vessels, and forcing the blood perhaps to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly growing fibers, cells, and organs, which would atrophy if not thus fed.

It is the time of the deepest interest in personal religion. Con- version usually takes place at adolescence. " In its most funda- mental sense, conversion is a natural, normal, universal, and neces- sary process at the stage when life pivots over from an autocentric to an heterocentric basis."

Psychically it is an upheaval period, a stage of reconstruction, of storm and stress, an Aufklarung. How revolutionary or cata- strophic the transformation will be chiefly depends upon the restraints and social sanctions which are enforced at this time.

Psychic adolescence is heralded by all-sided mobilization. The child from nine to twelve is well adjusted to his environment and proportionally developed ; he represents probably an old and relatively perfected stage of race-maturity, still in some sense ind degree feasible in warm climates, which, as we have previously urged, stands for a long-continued one, a terminal stage of human development at some post-simian point. At dawning adolescence this old unity and harmony with nature is broken up ; the child is driven from