arly in pubescent growth the heart increases by leaps and
bounds, often doubling its size in the course of two years or even one
year. There is a rise of about one degree in the temperature of the
blood and the blood pressure is increased in all parts of the body. The
entire body is unduly sensitized, and the boy is besieged by an army of
new and vivid sense impressions that overstimulate, confuse, and baffle
him. He is under stress and like all persons under tension he reacts
extremely and hence inconsistently in different directions. He cannot
correlate and organize his experiences. They are too vivid, varied, and
rapid for that. This over-intensity begets in turn excessive languor and
he cannot hold himself in _via media_.

His physical condition explains his marked moods: his sudden changes of
front, his ascent of rare heights of impulsive idealism, and his equally
sudden descent into the bogs of materialism; his unsurpassed though
temporary altruism and his intermittent abandon to gross selfishness. He
has range. He is a little more than himself in every direction. The wine
of life is in his blood and brain. It is no wonder that somewhere about
the middle of the adolescent period both conversions and misdemeanors
are at their maximum.

To make matters worse these vivid and unorganized experiences, simply
because they lie along the shore of the infinite and have no single
clue, no governing philosophy of life, are overswept by the dense and
chilling fogs of unreality that roll in from the great deep. Life is
swallowed up in awful mystery. External facts are less real than dreams.
One stamps the very ground beneath his feet to know if it exists. The
ego which must gauge itself by external bearings is temporarily adrift
and lost. Suicidal thoughts are easily evoked; and at such times the
luxury of being odd and hopelessly misunderstood constitutes a
chameleon-like morbidity that, with a slight change of light and color,
becomes an obsession of conceit. The odd one, the mystery to self and
others, is he not the great one that shall occupy the center of the
stage in some stupendous drama? A man now prominent in educational
circles testifies how that on a drizzly night on the streets of old
London the lad, then but sixteen years of age, came to a full stop, set
his foot down with dramatic pose, and exclaimed with soul-wracking
seriousness:

The time is out of joint;--O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set