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Page 48
* * * * *
A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written
about the _Binnenleben_, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings.
No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations
with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's
_Binnenleben_ is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his
consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This
inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe
articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are
often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic
quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it
consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the
sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are
not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists
in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary
an�sthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to
be in a human being at all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary,
there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour
in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of
security and readiness for anything that may turn up.
Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned _motor-apparatus_,
nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the
sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. They tell us that in
Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by
the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the _ski_, or
long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women
acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than
the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of
femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence'
sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have
been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious
creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who
are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and
delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every
educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and
tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly
extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going
also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its
tonic breath through all our American life.
I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained
and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the
well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher
education for men and women alike. The strength of the British Empire
lies in the strength of character of the individual Englishman, taken
all alone by himself. And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially
nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in
which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.
I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on
hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. I have
forgotten its author's name and its title, but I remember well an awful
prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system.
Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the
environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power
from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will
cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and
more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter
of energy on his own account. So that, if the _homo sapiens_ of the
future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we
not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of
beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a
fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man'
direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form
from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or
half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin
can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go,
along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever
more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our
crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible
little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will
constitute our most congenial occupation.
I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision. Mine
certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever
be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be
needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still
always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and
cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to
round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and
easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call
irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that
_acquiescentia in seipso_, as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up
from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being,
and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart
from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an element of
spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.
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