half-insights

Updated: May 31, 2025

Just as a young medical student with a rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene is sometimes disposed to undertake a more or less complete reform of his diet, regimen, etc., to make it "scientific" in a way that an older and a more learned physician would shrink from, so the half-insights of boys into matters of moral regimen are far too apt, in the American temperament, to expend, in precocious emancipation and crude attempts at practical realization, the force which is needed to bring their insights to maturity.

G. Stanley Hall - Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene