Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

The worst product of striving to do things with defective psychic impulsion is
fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace, multiplies errors and
inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui, flitting will specters, velleities
and caprices, and neurasthenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a
tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken the will
and leave the mind like a piece of well-used blotting paper, covered with traces
and nothing legible. All beginnings are easy, and only as we leave the early
stages of proficiency behind and press on in either physical or mental culture and
encounter difficulties, do individual differences and the tendency of weak will,
to change and turn to something else increase. Perhaps the greatest disparity
between men is the power to make a long concentrative, persevering effort, for
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister [The master shows himself in
limitation]. Now no kind or line of culture is complete till it issues in motor
habits, and makes a well-knit soul texture that admits concentration series in
many directions and that can bring all its resources to bear at any point. The
brain unorganized by training has, to recur to Richter's well-worn aphorism,
saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, or all the ingredients of gunpowder, but never
makes a grain of it because they never get together. Thus willed action is the
language of complete men and the goal of education. When things are
mechanized by right habituation, there is still further gain; for not only is the
mind freed for further and higher work, but this deepest stratum of motor
association is a plexus that determines not only conduct and character, but even
beliefs. The person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and weighs
alternatives is less completely organised than habits. All will culture is intensive
and should safeguard us against the chance influence of life and the insidious
danger of great ideas in small and feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and
perhaps racial, is just what arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic
stage. It makes weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It
divorces knowing and doing, Kennen and Können, a separation which the
Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was
exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that the pain of
violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked over till life speaks as
with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the water hose. The
purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more practical
form. Not only do muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and
sound ideas rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be
eliminated as error or superstition. The roots of play lie close to those of creative
imagination and idealism.