Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/805

Rh At the same time I do not say this in order to divert attention from what may be rightly called the natural animal instincts of man. I have no doubt there might be a cultivation of mind which should cease to be recreative, and which thereby should be as injurious to the health of the body as an over-cultivation of mere gross mechanical labor, and which might even be more dangerous. It is not a little interesting to observe that the greatest of the Greeks had become conscious of this very danger, as if he had learned its existence from observations in his daily life. Plato, in treating of this subject in one of his admirable discourses, warns us against the delusion that the cultivation of nothing but what is intellectually the best is, of necessity, always the best. It is more just, he says, to take account of good things than of evil. Everything good is beautiful; yet the beautiful is not without measure. An animal destined to be beautiful must possess symmetry. Of symmetries we understand those which are small, but are ignorant of the greatest. And, indeed, no symmetry is of more importance with respect to health and disease, virtue and vice, than that of the soul toward the body. When a weaker and inferior form is the vehicle of a strong and in every way mighty soul, or the contrary; and when these, soul and body, enter into compact union, then the animal is not wholly beautiful, for it is without symmetry., Just as a body which has immoderately long legs, or any other superfluity of parts that hinder its symmetry, becomes base, in the participation of labor suffers many afflictions, and, though suffering an aggregation of accidents, becomes the cause to itself of many ills, so the compound essence—of body and soul—which we call the animal, when the soul is stronger than the body and prevails over it—then the soul, agitating the whole body, charges it with diseases, and by ardent pursuit causes it to waste away. On the contrary, when a body that is large or superior to the soul is joined with a small and weak intellect, the motions of the more powerful, prevailing and enlarging what is their own, but making the reflective part of the soul deaf, indocile, and oblivious, it induces the greatest of all diseases, ignorance. As a practical corollary to these remarks, Plato adds that there is one safety for both the conditions he has specified: neither to move the soul without the body, nor the body without the soul. The mathematician, therefore, or any one else who ardently devotes himself to any intellectual pursuit, should at the same time engage the body in gymnastic exercises; while the man who is careful in forming the body should at the same time unite the motions of the soul, in the exercise of music and philosophy, if he intends to be one who may justly be called beautiful and at the same time "right good."

Such is the Platonic reading of the recreative life as it appeared to him in his day and among his marvelous people. We have but to trouble ourselves with half the problem he refers to, and with but half the advice that he suggests. Little fear, I think, is there among us that the soul should be so much stronger than the body, and so greatly