Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/254

248 of algebraic formulæ and a few dates in history are not to be compared. For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world of knowledge and have not physical power to use it?

Not only is a sound body an absolutely necessary correlate of a sound mind, but mental processes themselves are incomplete without muscular accompaniments. How vague would be our ideas of walking, talking, writing, painting, molding and chiseling without the muscular accompaniments. You can not even think hard of a word without involuntarily moving the muscles. Try it sometime by opening the mouth and thinking the word bobbin, bubble, etc. So-called 'mind reading,' table turning, the planchette, all illustrate the same fact.

Again, the body possesses all the gateways to the soul through which all knowledge of the outside world must come. Close the eyes, stop the ears, and deaden all the other sense-organs and the child is mindless—an idiot. Finally, no message can issue from the mind, nothing of its workings can be revealed and no control of the world forces be secured, save through the medium of physical organs—the muscles.

Consequently, to secure the highest mental efficiency we must give due consideration to bodily culture. Any education which disregards this is a failure. Every student should have sufficient food, adequate sleep, proper exercise, abundant recreation and in every way seek to promote bodily vigor.

The Socratic doctrine of innate ideas has been responsible for many pedagogical sins. Socrates taught that the business of teaching was to draw out these inborn ideas. The middle-age ascetics went so far as to assert that spiritual development could be best furthered by bodily torture. Consequently, in order to elevate the mind they strove to devise tortures to crucify the flesh. We read of their fasting, eating inappropriate foods, going barefooted and otherwise scantily clad in the dead of winter, wearing hair shirts with the hair inside; bathing in ice-cold springs in winter, sitting on sharp nails, assuming unnatural and extremely uncomfortable postures for months at a time, binding the body with ligatures, loading the body with weights, living in filth, going without sleep and working all day and all night, etc. Simeon Stylites is said to have lived for forty years chained on the top of a high pillar and Macarius slept for months in a marsh, exposing his naked body to the stings of venomous flies, in the misguided notion that the greater the bodily penance the more exalted the spirit became. In fact they tried to devise every possible means of excruciating torture of body in the attempt to exalt mind. To this pernicious doctrine of the relation between body and mind can be traced much of the long intellectual night of the middle ages. To it are directly traceable the beliefs in witchcraft, demonophobia, sorcery and the