Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 9

the brain, or the more readily the active parts are fed at cost
of the resting parts, the less is rest to be found in change from one of
these activities to another, and the less do concentration and
specialization prove to be dangerous. Before, the aim was to wake all
parts to function; now it is to connect them. Intensity of this
cross-section activity now tends to unity, so that all parts of the brain
energize together. In a brain with this switchboard function well
organized, each reaction has grown independent of its own stimulus
and may result from any stimulation, and each act, e.g., a finger
movement of a peculiar nature, may tire the whole brain. This helps us
to understand why brain-workers so often excel laborers not only in
sudden dynamometric strength test, but in sustained and long-enduring
effort. In a good brain or in a good machine, power may thus be
developed over a large surface, and all of it applied to a small one, and
hence the dangers of specialization are lessened in exact proportion as

the elements of our ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety
and delicacy of these combinations and all that they imply, far more
than in the elements of which they are composed, that man rises
farthest above the higher animals; and of these powers later
adolescence is the golden age. The aimless and archaic movements of
infancy, whether massive and complex or in the form of isolated
automatic tweaks or twinges, are thus, by slow processes of combined
analysis and synthesis, involving changes as radical as any in all the
world of growth, made over into habits and conduct that fit the world of
present environment.
But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of
completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some
automatisms refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are
often overworked. Here we must distinguish constantly between (1)
those growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and
(2) those that have become feral after this domestication of them has
lost power from disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been
subjugated because the central power that should have used them to
weave the texture of willed action--the proper language of complete
manhood--was itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many of
these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and
in some children more certainly than in others. In childhood, before
twelve, the efferent patterns should be developed into many more or
less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. Motor specialties
requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing,
pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a host
of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of
accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before its
great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of this age,
such as Hancock[10] described, who could not stand with feet close
together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk
backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a string
together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on toes or heels,
hop on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit fingers together
rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger and then reversing,
etc., are the very ones in whom automatisms are most marked or else

they are those constitutionally inert, dull, or uneducable.
In children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features of
inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in
stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting, tics
or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as they should, they
are seen in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the mirror or
facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises; and they may
tend to grow monstrous with age as if they were disintegrated
fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or motor parasites
leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and plasticity of
adaptation, till the distraction and anarchy of the individual nature
becomes conspicuous and pathetic.
At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is a
new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and
qualitative differentiation, and between volitional control and reflex
activities, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together into
wrong aggregates if right ones are not formed. Good manners and
correct motor form generally, as well as skill, are the most economic
ways of doing things; but this is the age of wasteful ways,
awkwardness mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital
energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint movements,
more