The normal physiological changes, quite apart from their psychological accompaniments, are such as to elicit the sympathy of intelligent adults.  Early 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 it right!

So is it ever with the adolescent soul unless society curses the desire for significance and makes it criminal.