health somewhere. Drawing upon the "second breath" too freely may become a pernicious habit, so that the reserve force is exhausted for cases of emergency.1 After all, each stage of growth has its distinct function, and it is well that we be sure to give each stage its fulness of opportunity, even though we may admit that rate and rhythm differ in individuals. Excess in anything is apt to warp development.

Dangers of Artificial Stimulation.-Artificial stimulation and insistence upon overprecision in early childhood may, as Stanley Hall shows, produce arrest of development. If, for instance, we expect too much of finer muscular adjustment in the young child (as in certain kindergarten and primary practices), chorea is often the result. The same author says:2

Among the chief external causes of diseases at this age (adolescent age) are all those influences which tend to precocity, e. g., city life with its early puberty, higher death-rate, wider range and greater superficiality of knowledge, observations of vice and enhanced temptation, lessened repose, incessant distraction, more impure air, greater liability to contagion, and absence of the sanifying influences and repose of nature in country life. At its best metropolitan life is hard on childhood and especially so on pubescents. . . . Civilization, with all its accumulated mass of culture and skills, its artifacts, its necessity of longer and severer apprenticeship and specialization, is ever harder on adolescents. . . . When we add to these predisposing causes the small and decreasing families, the later marriages, so that more and more are born of postmature parents and thus physiologically tend to precocity; the overnurture of only children, who are so prone to be spoiled and ripened still earlier by unwise fondness; the mixture of distant ethnic stocks that in

'Barr ("Mental Defectives," p. 125) intimates that backwardness and precocity in early childhood are related and are equally indicative of an abnormal ego.

* "Adolescence," I, pp. 321 ff.

crease the ferment of adolescence by multiplying the factors of heredity and so increasing its instability, we no longer wonder that many in these most vulnerable years make more or less complete shipwrecks at every stage of these hothouse demands which in the entire life of our race are so recent. Under these provocations, some instincts spring into activity with a suddenness that is almost explosive, and so prematurely, that as, e. g., with sex and drink, the strong and complex psychic mechanism of control has no time to develop and forbidden pleasures are tasted to satiety, till the soul has sometimes not only lost its innocence before it understood what purity and virtue really mean, but life is blasé, a burnt-out cinder, admiration, enthusiasm, and high ambitions are weakened or gone, and the soul is tainted with indifference or discouraged.

Normal growth is a process of maturing.

Any warping of this process, any excessive growth in some particular direction, especially in the line of specific intellectual activity, is apt to produce an unbalancing of the emotional equilibrium. This is the reason why genius is often characterized by extreme self-centredness and selfishness, even by a tendency toward cruelty and sexual license.

An International Problem.-That the problem of the exceptionally bright child is one which confronts other nations in about the same manner as it does our own, is evidenced, among many other facts, by an interesting article from the pen of a Japanese investigator, Yasusaburo Sakaki, professor of psychiatry at the Imperial University of Tokyo. He writes:1

I have endeavored to arrive at some trustworthy data as to the causes and varieties of abnormal intelligence in children, and to draw from these data some conclusions as to the treatment 1 "Abnormally Intelligent Pupils," translated from the German in the Int. Archiv für Schulhygiene, by W. A. Stecher.

appropriate to each type. With this purpose in view I examined all the children in the Normal School at Fukuoka in Japan, in which work I was assisted by Mr. Tomoziro Tomono, who is attached to the school in question. All the children showing an advanced degree of intelligence were set apart for special investigation. We found their number to be 79 out of 332. These selected children were classified according to definite types into seven groups, and were made the subjects of a series of tests for mental capacity, and the results were tabulated. The normal children were also tested in the same manner, and the results compared with those derived from the abnormal children. We found that only one class of abnormally intelligent children was perfectly free from any pathological taint, and that these were the only children who possessed stability of nerve-power and who exhibited uniformly progressive mental and physical development. These we have called the true cases of abnormal intelligence, the others being children of the "nervous" type, precocious children, children mentally advanced but deficient in physique, children who can be spurred to mental attainments above the average through external stimulation, but who are not able to maintain this level for any length of time, and, finally, children with remarkably good mental capacity who are lacking in feeling and in will.

Conclusion.-Professor Sakaki's findings tally very well with the views presented in this chapter. Exceptionally bright children, especially those of the last three classes, need a very careful consideration and must be educated in a manner which will be fair to them and helpful to the race. At present they receive less attention than the feeble-minded and defective. Yet their number is at least equal to the number of abnormals at the lowest end of the scale. They are infinitely more worth while than those. For from them come our leaders and builders, our banner-bearers and thoughtheroes, our saviors and our martyrs-as well as our destroyers, cranks, perverts, and felons, the Mephistopheles and the Tartuffes.

CHAPTER VIII

PSYCHOPATHIC DISORDERS AND PSYCHOPATHIC
CONSTITUTIONS

Dementia vs. Amentia.-In the foregoing chapters attention has been frequently directed to causes of mental deviations and of social failure which are found in the province of disturbances in the nervous constitution and the psychic life of children. Psychopathic disorders will explain the difficulties of many cases of exceptional development, whether they tend downward or upward. Even in distinct abnormality we must differentiate between dementia and amentia. The latter denotes absence of mental endowment of the normal human type; the former indicates loss or destruction of mental powers which the individual had once possessed. Mental defect, therefore, may be one of two kinds: either it is the product of disease affecting a potentially normal mind, or it is due to lack of development, so that an individual does not advance beyond the animal or primitive stage. This lack of development, again, is twofold in origin; it may be due to hereditary causes, predestining a child to perpetuate the defective character of its progenitors; or it may be the result of congenital lesions which check the growth of an originally normal nervous system. Even after birth, arrest of development may be produced by injury, disease, etc. The injury or disease which causes this arrest may be physical and physiological, as will happen in accidents, or in the weakening after-effects of germ-diseases; or it

may be psychic, as in the case of overstimulation, grief, mental shock, etc.

In this chapter psychopathic disorders will be discussed somewhat in detail.

Principiis Obsta! (Resist the Beginnings!)-It is a great pity that the beginning of these mental derangements are rarely observed, diagnosed, studied, and treated. The great German scholar, Ziehen, speaks of "psychopathic constitutions" which can be recognized in childhood. Doctor med. Helenefriederike Stelzner, a disciple of Ziehen, writes:

Contemplating all the forms of development of psychopathic constitution among school children, we shall readily discover among them a great many in which the entire complex of symptoms is at first merely suggested by some form of moral disturbance; for instance, stubbornness, difficulty of management, outspoken ego-centricity, lack of self-denial and self-discipline, non-resistance to bodily irritation, moodiness, etc. In dealing with these children, should not that kind of education be considered most effective which lays greater stress upon moral values than upon intellectual and material ones?

The fact that a good school record and examination certificate are very important for success in life, for the struggle for existence, induces many to attach too much significance to success in intellectual work and to relegate moral efficiency into the shadowy background. The natural egotism of the child is not sufficiently counterbalanced; the utilitarian principle is pushed to the front. Common rules of school education are only too apt to disregard conditions of common advance, and to substitute a vainglorious individualistic ambition which tempts the child to use his fists and elbows, so to speak, against his fellow pupils to secure his own advancement without regard to others. This selfish conduct is found in accentuated form among psychopaths. To be kind without receiving praise for it, to deny oneself something in the interest of somebody else without receiving a reward; to show courage in danger without