There are qualities which are permanently in herent in the germ plasm. We are considering here, however, that individual character, whether in herited or acquired, which belongs to the individ ual in his normal progress from his own cradle to that of his grandchildren, the particular set of traits which he actually exhibits in his relations with his fellows, in his career in the flesh. These traits may, indeed, be what a biologist might call body-characters, a fortuitous and transitory pos session of the particular individual, rather than de terminant-bearing chromosomes of the cell nucleus, carried along by the individual merely as a trustee of his racial stock, or they may be the more ephem eral but surely not unimportant qualities which belong to the individual himself, gained not from his inheritance, but from his education and envi ronment. We are not concerned at this stage with concealed defects of seed plasm, but with the man himself, body and living spirit, as he lives among us. Of this man we may say with confidence that whether he is to be temperate or intemperate, shift less or energetic, a deserter or a steady and re sponsible family man, a drone or a worker, a crim inal or a law-abiding member of society, a parasite or a self-dependent, surplus-producing creditor of society, an exploiter or a socialized captain of in dustry,—if his abilities give him this alternative,— all this depends largely on the educational in fluences, conscious and unconscious, brought to bear upon him in the formative period of life. As the twig is bent, the tree's inclined. It is an irri tatingly trite and a profoundly true saying.
Man's normal life, though it has its crises, is not sharply divided into census age-periods. We have refrained from setting precise boundaries to its stages of development, adopting words in ordinary use in their popular sense to suggest them. In dividuals differ widely both in physical and in social development, some passing earlier and some later from infancy to childhood, from childhood into adolescence, and from youth to maturity.
Infancy seems to begin definitely enough with birth, but even there we have had to push the boundary back to grandparents and remote an cestors, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, in another sense, long ago advised. We closed that first chap ter at about the time of the first birthday anniver sary. Childhood then begins at the point when education in its broadest sense begins to assume greater importance than food.
Adolescence is the period of growing up, i. e., from children into men and women. Babies and chil dren " grow "; boys and girls "grow up." The physiological transition begins to be apparent at different ages in different races and climates and in different individuals, and the time required for the process varies. Physiologists are inclined to place 117 it farther along than eighteen and twenty-one, the years at which we have been in the habit of consid ering that youths and maidens come of age, as the changes are not completely established, stability and equilibrium not entirely assured, until a few years later,—perhaps at about twenty-five. The
tendency in education and in economic relations is in the direction of making the "social" period of adolescence coterminous with the physiological.
By maturity we mean the point at which the individual has arrived at full growth and develop ment—by natural process, as the Latin word sug gests—not the maturity into which children are forced when set to work to support the family, or to assume other burdens and responsibilities which properly belong to adult life. An adult is a person who has grown up. It is the past participle of adolescere, and this word adolescere is akin to alere, which means "to nourish." So the past participle adult may be taken socially to mean, as it should, both grown up and nourished.
The stages of development merge gently into one another in the individual life, as in larger groups. If boys still think proudly, on their twenty-first birthday, that now they have arrived at man's full estate, there are almost sure to be several oc casions after that when they will doubt their claim to the title, or to which, at any rate, they will look back from the heights of fifty or sixty with wonder that so crude and unbalanced a youngster had been allowed such freedom. This is not necessarily proof, however, that his family or society showed poor judgment in leaving him at large. There has to be a period of learning by experience, however careful and wise the preparation which has been given. A girl's eighteenth birthday does not ordi narily mean much more to her than her sixteenth or nineteenth, unless she happens to be an heiress. Probably to the average girl the twentieth, when she "passes out of her teens," seems more significant, both to her, eagerly looking ahead, and to her family and friends, to whom she seems to be hurry ing on unnecessarily. The milestone into "middle age" is even more moveable. Nowadays a woman may say to herself at forty, " I suppose after this I shall be middle-aged," but she does not take any steps to announce it in her dress or her activities, and she probably says it again, with similar results, at forty-five and fifty and—who shall say how long? As for old age, in the traditional acceptance of that term, both men and women have repudiated it.
The period of life which we are now to consider begins, then, at the end of youth, when the young man and the young woman, brought to the thresh old of maturity—of body, mind, and soul—by the affectionate, sympathetic, and intelligent nurture of the family and the state, is ready to assume the toga virilis, to become an active participant in the economic and social and political life of the com munity, no longer primarily a consumer and a beneficiary, but henceforth producer as well as consumer, contributor as well as beneficiary. If the conditions which we have found to be neces sary for normal infancy, childhood, and youth have been met, our normal population arrives at man hood in physical vigor, untainted by disease, by in dulgence in vice and idleness, unweakened by over work, with minds and muscles and ideals trained for efficient work and efficient home life.