THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ADOLESCENCE. 45 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ADOLESCENCE.* 



By Professor JOSEPH JASTROW, 



UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. 



r I THE history of philosophical thought itself participates in the 

 -*- scheme of evolutionary progress which it expounds and records. 

 The sequence of culture changes and the soil of motives in which these 

 find root remain the permanently vital sources by which to illustrate 

 and to comprehend the nature of human endowment, striving and 

 achievement. For only half a century have we had access to an ade- 

 quate point of view that brings into the vista of the progress of the ages 

 the nature and the scope of evolutionary forces. This added insight 

 has come, more than any single factor, to stamp the pattern of modern 

 thought. We look backward not only with a different equipment in 

 the way of telescopic aids to such retrospective vision, but with very 

 different anticipation of what is thus to be discovered, and of its 

 significance. 



Though the application of evolutionary principles to mental endow- 

 ment has kept pace with its advance within the more strictly biological 

 field; and though the factors which psychological processes have them- 

 selves contributed to the trend of evolution have been of late prom- 

 inently recognized, yet the sum-total of these recognitions has gone 

 rather toward adding some chapters and an appendix or two to the 

 volume of philosophy, than towards the rewriting of the whole. Yet 

 the latter type of reconstruction of philosophy and psychology is by 

 no means unrepresented. The manner of such representation 

 naturally varies with author and subject, with scope and purpose; but 

 it is possible to set down a score or more of titles indicative of the 

 absorption into the ripest psychological thought of the tissue of evolu- 

 tionary doctrine. In some aspects this tendency appears in a still 

 more intensive and comprehensive form than has yet been accorded it, 

 in the psychological work of large dimensions which President G. 

 Stanley Hall has recently brought to an issue. The dominant message 

 of his pages is the notable one that psychology must ever remain close 

 to biology; that considerations of origin and of the potent past must 

 ever illuminate the road to the future. 



* ' Adolescence, its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthro- 

 pology, Sociology, Sex, Crime Religion and Education,' by G. Stanley Hall, 

 Ph.D., LL.D., president of Clark University and professor of psychology and 

 pedagogy. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1905. Two volumes. Pp. 

 589 4- 784. 



VOL,. LXVI. —30. 



