Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/663

Rh know why they died. It was because the spirit was already dead. And who has not heard it said that Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown or Mr. Jones is kept alive by his business? In view of what men might be interested in, it seems to me a very poor and bare and altogether a pitiable thing to be kept alive on.

Manual training is still too new to have seen its generations of schoolboys grow gray-haired, and it may easily turn out that when gray hairs do come, the disintegrating forces will have done their perfect work, and the boys now so full of promise will be found among the sad company that I have been picturing. As Thoreau says, we begin to gather the materials for a palace, and end by building a hut. But I do know that at least they start out in life warm and eager, that they are aglow with interest and vitality, and that they find life very full and rich.

The session of the manual training school ends between two and three. In those schools where that spirit of the complete life most prevails, where that spirit of radiancy is dominant, you will find boys and masters still at work at four, at five, and even at -six o'clock. And it is not uncommon for it to be necessary to make a rule when the boys must leave the building, in order to give the women a chance to make things clean and tidy for the next day. In the morning the boys begin coming at eight; they would come earlier if they were allowed. This voluntary devotion to the school is not to me without a deep significance. It shows that boys are happy at their work, that they are alive and interested. It indicates a measure of self-realization.

The increase of health which comes from the bodily exercise, and particularly the increase of muscular power that the manual work engenders—I mean muscular power not in an athletic sense so much as in a general organic sense—make the organism finer and better adapted to the work of the spirit, if I may use this dualistic phraseology without misleading any one. We can not make bricks without straw, and we can not build up emotional and intellectual power in the air. Like the energy which is the subject-matter of physics, this power is always associated with matter, may indeed be called the spiritual energy in matter, but with matter of a certain quality, highly organized, sensitive, sound. Dr. Johnson said that sick men were rascals, and I believe that he was more than half right. This statement will at once call to mind a goodly company of men and women, world heroes in fact, who were half invalids or wholly invalids, and who yet accomplished marvels in art, in science, and in humanity. But in no case can it be shown that this invalidism was in the brain tissue. The malady was of some special organ, and was perhaps a mortal malady, and yet for a time the brain centers