encouraged along these lines. Thus this ideal is also largely though not
exclusively remedial.
This system can arouse youth to the greatest pitch of zest in watching their own
rapidly multiplying curves of growth in dimensions and capacities, in plotting
curves that record their own increment in girths, lifts, and other tests, and in
observing the effects of sleep, food, correct and incorrect living upon a system
so exquisitely responsive to all these influences as are the muscles. To learn to
know and grade excellence and defect, to be known for the list of things one can
do and to have a record, or to realize what we lack of power to break best
records, even to know that we are strengthening some point where heredity has
left us with some shortage and perhaps danger, the realization of all this may
bring the first real and deep feeling for growth that may become a passion later
in things of the soul. Growth always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly
passing our own examination in this respect is a new and perhaps sometimes too
self-conscious endeavor of our young college barbarians; but it is on the whole a
healthful regulative, and this form of the struggle toward perfection and escape
from the handicap of birth will later move upward to the intellectual and moral
plane. To kindle a sense of physical beauty of form in every part, such as a
sculptor has, may be to start youth on the lowest round of the Platonic ladder that
leads up to the vision of ideal beauty of soul, if his ideal be not excess of brawn,
or mere brute strength, but the true proportion represented by the classic or mean
temperance balanced like justice between all extremes. Hard, patient, regular
work, with the right dosage for this self-cultural end, has thus at the same time a
unique moral effect.
The dangers of this system are also obvious. Nature's intent can not be too far
thwarted; and as in mental training the question is always pertinent, so here we
may ask whether it be not best in all cases to some extent, and in some cases
almost exclusively, to develop in the direction in which we most excel, to
emphasize physical individuality and even idiosyncrasy, rather than to strive for
monotonous uniformity. Weaknesses and parts that lag behind are the most
easily overworked to the point of reaction and perhaps permanent injury. Again,
work for curative purposes lacks the exuberance of free sports: it is not inspiring
to make up areas; and therapeutic exercises imposed like a sentence for the
shortcomings of our forebears bring a whiff of the atmosphere of the hospital, if
not of the prison, into the gymnasium.
These four ideals, while so closely interrelated, are as yet far from harmonized.