Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/771

 SHORTENING THE COLLEGE COURSE 751

the present age would be largely lost, because their successors would have neither time nor adaptability to master them, and so to conserve and perpetuate them. When the child hastens with too fleet a foot toward maturity, it means that he must adjust himself to some low sphere of thought and conduct. All com- plex and intricate things in intellect or achievement elaborated in the later stages of development he cannot appropriate.

Children on the streets of our great cities, who are con- demned to shift for a livelihood before they have entered their 'teens, reach the dead line betimes, and consequently their growth ceases when those under more favorable circumstances are still pushing forward, and possessing themselves of ever higher and more complex products of civilization. Of course, I am not speaking of the exceptional case of the genius, who usually manifests his superiority very early in life, as Sully, Galton, and others have shown ; but even the genius, whether musician, or painter, or poet, or scholar, or scientist, or philoso- pher, has a prolonged development. He does not get his set until late in his career, and in some cases his plasticity (which means his power of adaptation to new conditions) lasts until the very end.

One who is moving onward constantly in his development does not contract any system of mechanical habits concerned with some form of bread-winning, and this is a necessary con- dition for continual growth. But the case is quite different with one who has to do all for himself in the fight for life. Just as soon as the mind and body get organized for accomplishing certain definite ends which are required for self-preservation, just then the energies of the whole being tend to expand them- selves in the support of these activities, and the acquisition of other and higher modes of action is exceedingly difficult. The individual may become able to do these simple things well enough, but he jeopardizes his chances of ever being able to handle himself in more complicated situations. The street gamin, living in his simple but precarious way, becomes adept in the ways of the street shortly after he emerges from the cradle, but he is apt not to get beyond this point ever. While