knowledge, and there is no science but morals. He is the best man, says
Xenophon, who is always studying how to improve, and he is the happiest who
feels that he is improving. Life is a skill, an art like a handicraft, and true
knowledge a form of will. Good moral and physical development are more than
analogous; and where intelligence is separated from action the former becomes
mystic, abstract, and desiccated, and the latter formal routine. Thus mere
conscience and psychological integrity and righteousness are allied and mutually
inspiring.
Not only play, which is the purest expression of motor heredity, but work and all
exercise owe most of whatever pleasure they bring to the past. The first
influence of all right exercise for those in health is feeling of well-being and
exhilaration. This is one chief source of the strange enthusiasm felt for many
special forms of activity, and the feeling is so strong that it animates many forms
of it that are hygienically unfit. To act vigorously from a full store of energy
gives a reflex of pleasure that is sometimes a passion and may fairly intoxicate.
Animals must move or cease growing and die. While to be weak is to be
miserable, to feel strong is a joy and glory. It gives a sense of superiority,
dignity, endurance, courage, confidence, enterprise, power, personal validity,
virility, and virtue in the etymological sense of that noble word. To be active,
agile, strong, is especially the glory of young men. Our nature and history have
so disposed our frame that thus all physiological and psychic processes are
stimulated, products of decomposition are washed out by oxygenation and
elimination, the best reaction of all the ganglionic and sympathetic activities is
accused, and vegetative processes are normalized. Activity may exalt the spirit
almost to the point of ecstasy, and the physical pleasure of it diffuse, irradiate,
and mitigate the sexual stress just at the age when its premature localization is
most deleterious. Just enough at the proper time and rate contributes to
permanent elasticity of mood and disposition, gives moral self-control, rouses a
love of freedom with all that that great word means, and favors all higher human
aspirations.