Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/456

450 friend. No man can do his very best as an intellectual, moral, spiritual, being without employing his physical part in its very best estate in the work. Defect of body means, always, defect in the work of the man, either in quality or in quantity.

The physical frame is a machine, a transformer of natural energies. It is at once a home for the soul and a wonderful, an intricate and mysterious prime mover, an engine of which the motive forces are as yet undetermined and unmeasured. We know that its perfection is essential to the perfection of the humanity which it encloses and of which it is the vehicle; we know that the display of the intellectual and the spiritual power, the genius, of humanity is dependent upon the provision of ample stored physical energy and of efficient means of kinetizing and applying it to the purposes of the mind as well as of the body; we know that the animal machine is not a heat-engine; we think it is not an electrical generator; we are coming to believe that it is some form of chemical motor—possibly one in which the vital, the physical, and especially the chemical and electrical, energies find common source and origin in a common point of emanation. We know that, whatever its nature as a motor, it has an inherent efficiency far superior to that of any heat-engine yet devised and constructed by man. We know that it requires certain well-ascertained elements as its fuel—or food—that it must be kept well within the requirements of certain well-established physical laws; that, to maintain and promote its best and highest work, it must be cared for with scrupulous attention to certain definite hygienic laws. We know that the best possible, the highest possible, can only be attained by man when this curious and mysterious and inseparable vehicle of the soul is thus maintained in its best estate.

The building of the body—which means the building of the brain, always, and just as absolutely—the construction of the physical side of the man, is actually a problem in architecture and engineering and one, like all such problems, capable of a good or a bad or an indifferent, but never of a perfect, solution in any actual case. The building is carried on by mysterious and unknown forces within it and we can never touch them or their work without embarrassment or injury to both. We do, however, know positively certain laws and their action and certain rules of procedure in the adjustment of exterior conditions, favorably or unfavorably, and in supplying the necessaries of wholesome life. We know, in a general way, what should be the methods of life, of diet, of exercise, of use of powers of body and of mind. We know enough to make the difference, in most cases, between health and disease, success and failure of the physical man, and, in consequence, thus largely to determine the success or the failure of the real, the intellectual and spiritual, man.

The materials of the builder and their preparation for use are, on