Volume 1

Adolescence : its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley), 1844-1924.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

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.

    55/626 (page 29)
    is these processes that are chiefly sought, and other factors included in growth in weight are not true growth but, in a sense and in varying degrees, errors to be overcome. Of what actually goes on in the body, then, we know relatively little. No admittance is, as some one has said, the sign which nature hangs out to the physiologist. Could we weigh or measure the gain or loss on any of its higher planes, we might find very different laws of growth. We may conceive our ego as limited by the dermal surface and as scarcely even perforated by the twenty-two foot alimentary canal. We can not say just when the food we take becomes no longer a for- eign substance to be acted on, but part of the true physical self, and endowed itself with assimilative power, nor can we say when tissues on the down road of decay cease to be so, any more than the psychologist can tell when the matter of apperception becomes an organ of it. The suggestion is obvious, how- ever, that seasons of rest between growth periods may be times of the greatest qualitative improvement, when what we may call the higher digestion augments the complexity of structure and assimilative processes are carried on upon a higher plane, and all by the same growth impulse as its kinetic equivalent of augmentation in bulk. Of such changes, how- ever extensive or important, determinations of the mass of the body as a whole can give no intimation. Of the laws and processes of growth in individual tissues and organs, our knowledge is but limited, and of those in chemical com- plexity, we know still less, and yet it is not improbable that these more specific and higher changes are more closely re- lated to psychic development than is growth in height and weight. Mass, cytological change, and chemical complexity and functions, then, are the three factors or dimensions of growth, and many of the mysteries in which it is now shroud- ed will remain unsolved till we know more of the last two and of their relations. Studies of fatigue and all we know of metabolism indicate that the second factor is far more vari- able, especially within short periods, than mass, as well as far more closely associated with function. The rate of growth is a result of many determinants. Race and heredity seem to decree for every individual being