This period of groping is complicated by the fact that the youth’s power for appreciating is far ahead of his ability for expression.  “The inner traffic fairly obstructs the outer current,” and it is nothing short of cruelty to over-stimulate his senses as does the modern city.  This period is difficult everywhere, but it seems at times as if a great city almost deliberately increased its perils.  The newly awakened senses are appealed to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by the flippant street music, the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows.  This fundamental susceptibility is thus evoked without a corresponding stir of the higher imagination, and the result is as dangerous as possible.  We are told upon good authority that “If the imagination is retarded, while the senses remain awake, we have a state of esthetic insensibility,”—­in other words, the senses become sodden and cannot be lifted from the ground.  It is this state of “esthetic insensibility” into which we allow the youth to fall which is so distressing and so unjustifiable.  Sex impulse then becomes merely a dumb and powerful instinct without in the least awakening the imagination or the heart, nor does it overflow into neighboring fields of consciousness.  Every city contains hundreds of degenerates who have been over-mastered and borne down by it; they fill the casual lodging houses and the infirmaries.  In many instances it has pushed men of ability and promise to the bottom of the social scale.  Warner, in his American Charities, designates it as one of the steady forces making for failure and poverty, and contends that “the inherent uncleanness of their minds prevents many men from rising above the rank of day laborers and finally incapacitates them even for that position.”  He also suggests that the modern man has a stronger imagination than the man of a few hundred years ago and that sensuality destroys him the more rapidly.

It is difficult to state how much evil and distress might be averted if the imagination were utilized in its higher capacities through the historic paths.  An English moralist has lately asserted that “much of the evil of the time may be traced to outraged imagination.  It is the strongest quality of the brain and it is starved.  Children, from their earliest years, are hedged in with facts; they are not trained to use their minds on the unseen.”

In failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the most precious implements for ministering to life’s highest needs.  There is no doubt that this ill 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.