Volume 1
Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education / by G. Stanley Hall.
- G. Stanley Hall
- Date:
- 1904
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.
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![by the experience of life, but are unacquainted with the limiting force of circumstances; and a great idea of one’s own deserts, such as is characteristic of a sanguine disposition, is itself a form of high aspira- tion. Again, in their actions they prefer honor to expediency, as it is habit rather than calculation which is the rule of their lives, and, while calculation pays regard to expediency, virtue pays regard exclusively to honor. Youth is the age when people are most devoted to their friends or relations or companions, as they are then extremely fond of social intercourse and have not yet learned to judge their friends, or indeed anything else, by the rule of expediency. If the young com- mit a fault, it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration in defiance of Chilon’s maxim (fir]8ev ayav) ; for they carry everything too far, whether it be their love or hatred or anything else. They regard themselves as omniscient and are positive in their assertions; this is, in fact, the reason of their carrying everything too far. Also their offenses take the line of insolence and not of meanness. They are compassionate from supposing all people to be virtuous, or at least better than they really are; for as they estimate their neighbors by their own guilelessness, they regard the evils which befall them as undeserved. Finally, they are fond of laughter and consequently facetious, facetiousness being disciplined insolence.* 1 II. Keim, who has written one of the most comprehensive and scholarly of all the lives of Jesus, thinks that many, if not most, of his disciples, when he chose them, were adolescents. He says: Though some of the disciples, as well as of the women, may have been married, yet an age of not much more than twenty years is plainly indicated in the case of the four first called, notably of the sons of Zebedee, and also of James the younger, of the youth in Judaea and Gethsemane, nay, indeed, of most of them, for they are represented as coming directly from the houses of their parents, and Jesus cautions them against preferring their parents to their Teacher, against jealous fancies and ebullitions of temper, and administers to them truly pater- nal censures. Just such an attitude was assumed by the Scribes toward “ the young ”; and thus might Jesus hope—as did Luther in more modern times—to win the old and to tear up the deeply rooted Phari- saic bondage, by means of the fresh and vigorous youths whom Juda- ism itself looked upon as the guard of the coming Messiah. He might also hope to find in youth the next neighbor to that innocent and humble childlikeness to which he could promise and give the kingdom of heaven.1 1 Welldon : Rhetoric of Aristotle. New York, 1886, pp. 164-166. 1 Keim, Theodor: The History of Jesus of Nazara. Translated by Arthur Ransom. London, 1877, vol. iii, p. 279.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21523241_0001_0553.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
