adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital
energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature manifestations
which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping process.
Every high school boy and girl knows the difference between the
concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would
be hopelessly bewildered by the use of the terms. They will declare
one of their companions to be "in love" if his fancy is occupied by
the image of a single person about whom all the newly found values
gather, and without whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if
the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and the values
evoked are dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly seems
to have discovered a beauty and significance in many things--he
responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with
religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young
people, easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion.

It is neither a short nor an easy undertaking to substitute the love
of beauty for mere desire, to place the mind above the senses; but is
not this the sum of the immemorial obligation which rests upon the
adults of each generation if they would nurture and restrain the
youth, and has not the whole history of civilization been but one long
effort to substitute psychic impulsion for the driving force of blind
appetite?

Society has recognized the "imitative play" impulse of children and
provides them with tiny bricks with which to "build a house," and
dolls upon which they may lavish their tenderness. We exalt the love
of the mother and the stability of the home, but in regard to those
difficult years between childhood and maturity we beg the question and
unless we repress, we do nothing. We are so timid and inconsistent