Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/345

Rh all proportion to that which should have followed. A critical, candid self-survey will often astonish and alarm us at the close escapes we have made from impulsions which swayed us forcefully. What consequences have we escaped by sheer accident? In short, how can we wisely make allowances for forces potent in others, the nature of which we may only dimly know and are practically unable to appreciate in all their temporary despotism? The question is how far will the normal impulses carry any one? We plume ourselves on our own individual solidarity, poise, achievements, our importance in the community; yet we have survived endless perils by means of some judgment and more luck.

G. Stanley Hall, the master mind in childhood psychology, tells us in this connection that:

Many of the morbid mental phenomena are merely those of overaccentuation of processes normal at puberty. The germs of many of these disturbances lie in the common faults of childhood, which are now studied under the name of pedagogic pathology. We must seek the key to these perversions by addressing ourselves to the larger underlying and preliminary problems of determining the natural forms of psychic and somatic transitions from childhood to maturity, and study what puberty and adolescence really mean as developmental stages of human life.

Adolescence begins with the new wave of vitality seen in growth; in the modifications of nearly every organ; new interests, instincts, and tendencies arise, increased appetites and curiosity, so that it is the physiologic second birth. Passions and desires spring into vigorous life, but with them normally comes, or should come, the evolution of higher powers of control and inhibition. The momentum of inheritance may be sufficient and Binschwanger conceived the psychic morbidities of this age as due to exhaustion or lack of capital.

In the earliest education of all boys, whether in the family, the kindergarten or the school, one definite principle, it seems to me, should be held in mind as of paramount importance. This is motor training. The potentiality of this postulate is readily demonstrable, yet the history of education exhibits here a neglect, seeming to argue that if the principle were so vital it would have been enforced long ago. There is some modification in these later years. Froebel makes partial use of motor training in his beautiful idealizations, but it is subordinated to an optimistic expression of the good, the beautiful, the divine, needful but lacking in robust practicability. Man is put into the world to do something, to be something, and the obvious way to accomplish this is by primitive forms of labor. He may, and should, think, worship and aim for high ideals. In all this he should achieve concrete things. It is by no means proved that he can do this, except through the gradual process of fitting himself to become a practical part of the divine scheme. In this there is no place for drones. In due time he may devote himself, after earning the right, to physical quiescence, to thought, to contemplation. Man may, if he so elects, try to achieve a serene mental attitude (nirvana or kaaf) until