THE MUSCLES AND MOTOR POWERS IN GENERAL
Muscles as organs of the will, of character and even of thought--The
muscular virtues--Fundamental and accessory muscles and functions--The
development of the mind and of the upright position--Small
muscles as organs of thought--School lays too much stress upon
these--Chorea--vast numbers of automatic movements in children--Great
variety of spontaneous activities--Poise, control and spurtiness--Pen
and tongue wagging--Sedentary school life _vs_ free out-of-door
activities--Modern decay of muscles, especially in girls--Plasticity
of motor habits at puberty.
The muscles are by weight about forty-three per cent. of the average
adult male human body. They expend a large fraction of all the kinetic
energy of the adult body, which a recent estimate places as high as
one-fifth. The cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over
most of the lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that their culture
is brain building. In a sense they are organs of digestion, for which
function they play a very important rôle. Muscles are in a most
intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built
all the roads, cities, and machines in the world, written all the
books, spoken all the words, and, in fact, done everything that man
has accomplished with matter. If they are undeveloped or grow relaxed
and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their
execution is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a sense
defined as a plexus of motor habits. To call conduct three-fourths of
life, with Matthew Arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and
two-thirds will, with Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does
or that he is the sum of his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that
character is simply muscle habits, with Maudsley; that the age of art
is now slowly superseding the age of science, and that the artist will
drive out with the professor, with the anonymous author of "Rembrandt
als Erzicher";[1] that history is consciously willed movements, with
Bluntschli; or that we could form no conception of force or energy in
the world but for our own muscular effort; to hold that most thought
involves change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it--all
this shows how we have modified the antique Ciceronian conception
_vivere est cogitari_, [To live is to think] to _vivere est velle_,
[To live is to will] and gives us a new sense of the importance of
muscular development and regimen.[2]
Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of expression for all
efferent processes. Beyond all their demonstrable functions, every
change of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them
unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may
be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which
some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of
the world, in the anthropomorphism of force. Habits even determine the
deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not
words, are the language of complete men. The motor areas are closely
related and largely identical with the psychic, and muscle culture
develops brain-centers as nothing else yet demonstrably does. Muscles
are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and
even of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is
cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for all,
education is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and
perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue,
velleity, caprice, _ennui_, restlessness, lack of control and poise,
muscular faults.
To understand the momentous changes of motor functions that
characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable
aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all
normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the
progress from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the
muscles and movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips,
shoulders, knees, and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in
general man has in common with the higher and larger animals. Their
activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as
of the legs in walking, and predominate in hard-working men and women
with little culture or intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter
or accessory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and
articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and
greatly diversified series, as those used in writing, talking,
piano-playing. They are represented by smaller and more numerous
muscles, whose functions develop later in life and represent a higher
standpoint of evolution. These smaller muscles for finer movements
come into function later and are chiefly associated with psychic
activity, which plays upon them by incessantly changing their
tensions, if not causing actual movement. It is these that are so
liable to disorder in the many automatisms and choreic tics we see in
school children, especially if excited or fatigued. General paralysis
usually begins in the higher levels by breaking these down, so that
the first symptom of its insidious and never interrupted progress is
inability to execute the more exact and delicate movements of tongue
or hand, or both. Starting with the latest evolutionary level, it is a
devolution that may work downward till very many of the fundamental
activities are lost before death.
Nothing better illustrates this distinction than the difference
between the fore foot of animals and the human hand. The first begins
as a fin or paddle or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for
locomotion. Some carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for
holding well as tearing, and others for digging. Arboreal life seems
to have almost created the simian hand and to have wrought a
revolution in the form and use of the forearm and its accessory
organs, the fingers. Apes and other tree-climbing creatures must not
only adjust their prehensile organ to a wide variety of distances and
sizes of branches, but must use the hands more or less freely for
picking, transporting, and eating fruit; and this has probably been a
prime factor in lifting man to the erect position, without which human
intelligence as we know it could have hardly been possible. "When we
attempt to measure the gap between man and the lower animals in terms
of the form of movement, the wonder is no less great than when we use
the term of mentality."[3] The degree of approximation to human
intelligence in anthropoid animals follows very closely the degree of
approximation to human movements.
The gradual acquirement of the erect position by the human infant
admirably repeats this long phylogenetic evolution.[4] At first the
limbs are of almost no use in locomotion, but the fundamental trunk
muscles with those that move the large joints are more or less
spasmodically active. Then comes creeping, with use of the hip
muscles, while all below the knee is useless, as also are the fingers.
Slowly the leg and foot are degraded to locomotion, slowly the great
toe becomes more limited in its action, the thumb increases in
flexibility and strength of opposition, and the fingers grow more
mobile and controllable. As the body slowly assumes the vertical
attitude, the form of the chest changes till its greatest diameter is
transverse instead of from front to back. The shoulder-blades are less
parallel than in quadrupeds, and spread out till they approximate the
same plane. This gives the arm freedom of movement laterally, so that
it can be rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in man as contrasted
to one hundred degrees in apes, thus giving man the command of almost
any point within a sphere of which the two arms are radii. The power
of grasping was partly developed from and partly added to the old
locomotor function of the fore limbs; the jerky aimless automatisms,
as well as the slow rhythmic flexion and extension of the fingers and
hand, movements which are perhaps survivals of arboreal or of even
earlier aquatic life, are coördinated; and the bilateral and
simultaneous rhythmic movements of the heavier muscles are
supplemented by the more finely adjusted and specialized activities
which as the end of the growth period is approached are determined
less by heredity and more by environment. In a sense, a child or a man
is the sum total of his movements or tendencies to move; and nature
and instinct chiefly determine the basal, and education the accessory
parts of our activities.
The entire accessory system is thus of vital importance for the
development of all of the arts of expression. These smaller muscles
might almost be called organs of thought. Their tension is modified
with the faintest change of soul, such as is seen in accent,
inflection, facial expressions, handwriting, and many forms of
so-called mind-reading, which, in fact, is always muscle-reading. The
day-laborer of low intelligence, with a practical vocabulary of not
over five hundred words, who can hardly move each of his fingers
without moving others or all of them, who can not move his brows or
corrugate his forehead at will, and whose inflection is very
monotonous, illustrates a condition of arrest or atrophy of this
later, finer, accessory system of muscles. On the other hand, the
child, precocious in any or all of these later respects, is very
liable to be undeveloped in the larger and more fundamental parts and
functions. The full unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable
condition precedent for the normal development to full and abiding
maturity of the higher and more refined muscularity, just as
conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of adolescence mark a
temporary loss of balance in the opposite direction. If this general
conception be correct, then nature does not finish the basis of her
pyramid in the way Ross, Mercier, and others have assumed, but lays a
part of the foundation and, after carrying it to an apex, normally
goes back and adds to the foundation to carry up the apex still higher
and, if prevented from so doing, expends her energy in building the
apex up at a sharper angle till instability results. School and
kindergarten often lay a disproportionate strain on the tiny accessory
muscles, weighing altogether but a few ounces, that wag the tongue,
move the pen, and do fine work requiring accuracy. But still at this
stage prolonged work requiring great accuracy is irksome and brings
dangers homologous to those caused by too much fine work in the
kindergarten before the first adjustment of large to small muscles,
which lasts until adolescence, is established. Then disproportion
between function and growth often causes symptoms of chorea. The chief
danger is arrest of the development and control of the smaller
muscles. Many occupations and forms of athletics, on the contrary,
place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles to the
neglect of finer motor possibilities. Some who excel in heavy
athletics no doubt coarsen their motor reactions, become not only
inexact and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large
muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones arrested. On the other
hand, many young men, and probably more young women, expend too little
of their available active energy upon basal and massive muscle work,
and cultivate too much, and above all too early, the delicate
responsive work. This is, perhaps, the best physiological
characterization of precocity and issues in excessive nervous and
muscular irritability. The great influx of muscular vigor that unfolds
during adolescent years and which was originally not only necessary to
successful propagation, but expressive of virility, seems to be a very
plastic quantity, so that motor regimen and exercise at this stage is
probably more important and all-conditioning for mentality, sexuality,
and health than at any other period of life. Intensity, and for a time
a spurty diathesis, is as instinctive and desirable as are the copious
minor automatisms which spontaneously give the alphabet out of which
complex and finer motor series are later spelled by the conscious
will. Mercier and others have pointed out that, as most skilled labor,
so school work and modern activities in civilized life generally lay
premature and disproportionate strains upon those kinds of movement
requiring exactness. Stress upon basal movements is not only
compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the disorders
of the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or prophylactic
for fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, control,
and psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when contractions reach choreic
intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale
that measures the difference between primary and secondary movements
and to make the former predominate.
The number of movements, the frequency with which they are repeated,
their diversity, the number of combinations, and their total kinetic
quantum in young children, whether we consider movements of the body
as a whole, fundamental movements of large limbs, or finer accessory
motions, is amazing. Nearly every external stimulus is answered by a
motor response. Dresslar[5] observed a thirteen months' old baby for
four hours, and found, to follow Preyer's classification, impulsive or
spontaneous, reflex, instinctive, imitative, inhibitive, expressive,
and even deliberative movements, with marked satisfaction in rhythm,
attempts to do almost anything which appealed to him, and almost
inexhaustible efferent resources. A friend has tried to record every
word uttered by a four-year-old girl during a portion of a day, and
finds nothing less than verbigerations. A teacher noted the activities
of a fourteen-year-old boy during the study time of a single school
day[6], with similar results.
Lindley[7] studied 897 common motor automatisms in children, which he
divided into 92 classes: 45 in the region of the head, 20 in the feet
and legs, 19 in the hands and fingers. Arranged in the order of
frequency with which each was found, the list stood as follows:
fingers, feet, lips, tongue, head, body, hands, mouth, eyes, jaws,
legs, forehead, face, arms, ears. In the last five alone adolescents
exceeded children, the latter excelling the former most in those of
head, mouth, legs, and tongue, in this order. The writer believes that
there are many more automatisms than appeared in his returns.
School life, especially in the lower grades, is a rich field for the
study of these activities. They are familiar, as licking things,
clicking with the tongue, grinding the teeth, scratching, tapping,
twirling a lock of hair or chewing it, biting the nails (Bérillon's
onychophagia), shrugging, corrugating, pulling buttons or twisting
garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, thumbs, rotating, nodding
and shaking the head, squinting and winking, swaying, pouting and
grimacing, scraping the floor, rubbing hands, stroking, patting,
flicking the fingers, wagging, snapping the fingers, muffling,
squinting, picking the face, interlacing the fingers, cracking the
joints, finger plays, biting and nibbling, trotting the leg, sucking
things, etc.
The average number of automatisms per 100 persons Smith found to be in
children 176, in adolescents 110. Swaying is chiefly with children;
playing and drumming with the fingers is more common among
adolescents; the movements of fingers and feet decline little with
age, and those of eyes and forehead increase, which is significant for
the development of attention. Girls excel greatly in swaying, and
also, although less, in finger automatism; and boys lead in movements
of tongue, feet, and hands. Such movements increase, with too much
sitting, intensity of effort, such as to fix attention, and vary with
the nature of the activity willed, but involve few muscles directly
used in a given task. They increase up the kindergarten grades and
fall off rapidly in the primary grades; are greater with tasks
requiring fine and exact movements than with those involving large
movements. Automatisms are often a sign of the difficulty of tasks.
The restlessness that they often express is one of the commonest signs
of fatigue. They are mostly in the accessory muscles, while those of
the fundamental muscles (body, legs, and arms) disappear rapidly with
age; those of eye, brow, and jaw show greatest increase with age, but
their frequency in general declines with growing maturity, although
there is increased frequency of certain specialized contractions,
which indicate the gradual settling of expression in the face.
Often such movements pass over by insensible gradation into the morbid
automatism of chorea, and in yet lower levels of decay we see them in
the aimless picking and plucking movements of the fingers of the sick.
In idiots[8] arrest of higher powers often goes with hypertrophy of
these movements, as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels
those partially blind to rub the eyes for "light-hunger," so it
prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for cerebrations),
rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc. Movements often pass to fixed
attitudes and postures of limbs or body, disturbing the normal balance
between flexors and extensors, the significance of which as nerve
signs or exponents of habitual brain states and tensions Warner has so
admirably shown.
Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a
considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.
Many of what are now often called nerve signs and even choreic
symptoms, the fidgetiness in school on cloudy days and often after a
vacation, the motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment,
extreme effort, excitement, fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the
forms in which we receive the full momentum of heredity and mark a
natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and
especially of will. Hence they must be abundant. All parts should act
in all possible ways at first and untrammeled by the activity of all
other parts and functions. Some of these activities are more essential
for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements. Here
as everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded
before the ability to check or even to use them can develop. All
movements arising from spontaneous activity of nerve cells or centers
must be made in order even to avoid the atrophy of disease. Not only
so, but this purer kind of innateness must often be helped out to some
extent in some children by stimulating reflexes; a rich and wide
repertory of sensation must be made familiar; more or less and very
guarded, watched and limited experiences of hunger, thirst, cold,
heat, tastes, sounds, smells, colors, brightnesses, tactile
irritations, and perhaps even occasional tickling and pain to play off
the vastly complex function of laughing, crying, etc., may in some
cases be judicious. Conscious and unconscious imitation or repetition
of every sort of copy may also help to establish the immediate and
low-level connection between afferent and efferent processes that
brings the organism into direct _rapport_ and harmony with the whole
world of sense. Perhaps the more rankly and independently they are
developed to full functional integrity, each in its season, if we only
knew that season, the better. Premature control by higher centers, or
coördination into higher compounds of habits and ordered serial
activities, is repressive and wasteful, and the mature will of which
they are components, or which must at least domesticate them, is
stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly
abridged.
But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a
little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked,
and organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The
inhibiting functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the
child sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps
makes every muscle tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts.
This repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous
centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of
arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that
normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell, being
mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic
lability in the sense of Wundt's _Mechanik der Nerven_. The concept
now suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradiation or long
circuiting to higher and more complex brain areas, so that the energy,
whether spontaneous or reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. These
combinations are of a higher order, more remote from reflex action,
and modified by some Jacksonian third level.[9] Action is now not from
independent centers, but these are slowly associated, so that
excitation may flow off from one point to any other and any reaction
may result from any stimulus.
The more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and
the lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the
whole. The tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow
into those of lower tension than themselves increases as
correspondence in time and space widens. The more one of a number of
activities gains in power to draw on all the brain, or the more
readily the active parts are fed at cost of the resting parts, the
less is rest to be found in change from one of these activities to
another, and the less do concentration and specialization prove to be
dangerous. Before, the aim was to wake all parts to function; now it
is to connect them. Intensity of this cross-section activity now tends
to unity, so that all parts of the brain energize together. In a brain
with this switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown
independent of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation,
and each act, e.g., a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire
the whole brain. This helps us to understand why brain-workers so
often excel laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test,
but in sustained and long-enduring effort. In a good brain or in a
good machine, power may thus be developed over a large surface, and
all of it applied to a small one, and hence the dangers of
specialization are lessened in exact proportion as the elements of our
ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of
these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the
elements of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the
higher animals; and of these powers later adolescence is the golden
age. The aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and
complex or in the form of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are
thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving
changes as radical as any in all the world of growth, made over into
habits and conduct that fit the world of present environment.
But, thirdly, this long process carried out with all degrees of
completeness may be arrested at any unfinished stage. Some automatisms
refuse to be controlled by the will, and both they and it are often
overworked. Here we must distinguish constantly between (1) those
growing rankly in order to be later organized under the will, and (2)
those that have become feral after this domestication of them has lost
power from disease or fatigue, and (3) those that have never been
subjugated because the central power that should have used them to
weave the texture of willed action--the proper language of complete
manhood--was itself arrested or degenerate. With regard to many of
these movements these distinctions can be made with confidence, and in
some children more certainly than in others. In childhood, before
twelve, the efferent patterns should be developed into many more or
less indelible habits, and their colors set fast. Motor specialties
requiring exactness and grace like piano-playing, drawing, writing,
pronunciation of a foreign tongue, dancing, acting, singing, and a
host of virtuosities, must be well begun before the relative arrest of
accessory growth at the dawn of the ephebic regeneration and before
its great afflux of strength. The facts seem to show that children of
this age, such as Hancock[10] described, who could not stand with feet
close together and eyes closed without swaying much, could not walk
backward, sit still half a minute, dress alone, tie two ends of a
string together, interlace slats, wind thread, spin a top, stand on
toes or heels, hop on each foot, drive a nail, roll a hoop, skate, hit
fingers together rapidly in succession beginning at the little finger
and then reversing, etc., are the very ones in whom automatisms are
most marked or else they are those constitutionally inert, dull, or
uneducable.
In children these motor residua may persist as characteristic features
of inflection, accent, or manners; automatisms may become morbid in
stammering or stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting,
tics or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as they should,
they are seen in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the
mirror or facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises;
and they may tend to grow monstrous with age as if they were
disintegrated fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or
motor parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and
plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction and anarchy of the
individual nature becomes conspicuous and pathetic.
At puberty, however, when muscle habits are so plastic, when there is
a new relation between quantity or volume of motor energy and
qualitative differentiation, and between volitional control and reflex
activities, these kinetic remnants strongly tend to shoot together
into wrong aggregates if right ones are not formed. Good manners and
correct motor form generally, as well as skill, are the most economic
ways of doing things; but this is the age of wasteful ways,
awkwardness mannerisms, tensions that are a constant leakage of vital
energy, perhaps semi-imperative acts, contortions, quaint movements,
more elaborated than in childhood and often highly anesthetic and
disagreeable, motor coördinations that will need laborious
decomposition later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, with
some modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and
faulty attitudes, carriage, and postures in children; viz., some form
of overpressure or misfit between environment and nature. As during
the years from four to eight there is great danger that overemphasis
of the activities of the accessory muscles will sow the seeds of
chorea, or aggravate predispositions to it, now again comes a greatly
increased danger, hardly existing from eight to twelve, that
overprecision, especially if fundamental activities are neglected,
will bring nervous strain and stunting precocity. This is again the
age of the basal, e.g., hill-climbing muscle, of leg and back and
shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest
muscles. Now again, the study of a book, under the usual conditions of
sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has
a tendency to overstimulate the accessory muscles. This is especially
harmful for city children who are too prone to the distraction of
overmobility at an age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor
income and expenditure; and it constitutes not a liberal or
power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing,
and weakening education unless offset by safeguards better than any
system of gymnastics, which is at best artificial and exaggerated.
As Bryan well says, "The efficiency of a machine depends so far as we
know upon the maximum force, rate, amplitude, and variety of direction
of its movements and upon the exactness with which below these maxima
the force, rate, amplitude, and direction of the movements can be
controlled." The motor efficiency of a man depends upon his ability in
all these respects. Moreover, the education of the small muscles and
fine adjustments of larger ones is as near mental training as physical
culture can get; for these are the thought-muscles and movements, and
their perfected function is to reflect and express by slight
modifications of tension and tone every psychic change. Only the brain
itself is more closely and immediately an organ of thought than are
these muscles and their activity, reflex, spontaneous, or imitative in
origin. Whether any of them are of value, as Lindley thinks, in
arousing the brain to activity, or as Müller suggests, in drawing off
sensations or venting efferent impulses that would otherwise distract,
we need not here discuss. If so, this is, of course, a secondary and
late function--nature's way of making the best of things and utilizing
remnants.
With these facts and their implications in mind we can next pass to
consider the conditions under which the adolescent muscles best
develop. Here we confront one of the greatest and most difficult
problems of our age. Changes in modern motor life have been so vast
and sudden as to present some of the most comprehensive and
all-conditioning dangers that threaten civilized races. Not only have
the forms of labor been radically changed within a generation or two,
but the basal activities that shaped the body of primitive man have
been suddenly swept away by the new methods of modern industry. Even
popular sports, games, and recreations, so abundant in the early life
of all progressive peoples, have been reduced and transformed; and the
play age, that once extended on to middle life and often old age, has
been restricted. Sedentary life in schools and offices, as we have
seen, is reducing the vigor and size of our lower limbs. Our industry
is no longer under hygienic conditions; and instead of being out of
doors, in the country, or of highly diversified kinds, it is now
specialized, monotonous, carried on in closed spaces, bad air, and
perhaps poor light, especially in cities. The diseases and arrest bred
in the young by life in shops, offices, factories, and schools
increase. Work is rigidly bound to fixed hours, uniform standards,
stints and piece-products; and instead of a finished article, each
individual now achieves a part of a single process and knows little of
those that precede or follow. Machinery has relieved the large basal
muscles and laid more stress upon fine and exact movements that
involve nerve strain. The coarser forms of work that involve hard
lifting, carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and
skilled labor requires more and more brain-work. It has been estimated
that "the diminution of manual labor required to do a given quantity
of work in 1884 as compared with 1870 is no less than 70 per
cent."[11] Personal interest in and the old native sense of
responsibility for results, ownership and use of the finished
products, which have been the inspiration and soul of work in all the
past, are in more and more fields gone. Those who realize how small a
proportion of the young male population train or even engage in
amateur sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked men
strive for records, and how immediate and amazing are the results of
judicious training, can best understand how far below his
possibilities as a motor being the average modern man goes through
life, and how far short in this respect he falls from fulfilling
nature's design for him.
For unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered,
made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride
relatively unencumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with
rude implements where we use machines of many man-power. In the stone,
iron, and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with
infinite pains and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge
of the processes by which they are made. As hunter he followed game,
which, when found, he chased, fought, and overcame in a struggle
perhaps desperate, while we shoot it at a distance with little risk or
effort. In warfare he fought hand to hand and eye to eye, while we
kill "with as much black powder as can be put in a woman's thimble."
He caught and domesticated scores of species of wild animals and
taught them to serve him; fished with patience and skill that
compensated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; danced
to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in memory of his forebears
imitating every animal, rehearsing all his own activities in mimic
form to the point of exhaustion, while we move through a few figures
in closed spaces. He dressed hides, wove baskets which we can not
reproduce, and fabrics which we only poorly imitate by machinery, made
pottery which set our fashions, played games that invigorated body and
soul. His courtship was with feats of prowess and skill, and meant
physical effort and endurance.
Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar
and high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular
development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. Grave as are
the evils of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this
country now suffer from too little than from too much physical
exercise, while most who suffer from work do so because it is too
uniform, one-sided, accessory, or performed under unwholesome
conditions, and not because it is excessive in amount. Modern industry
has thus largely ceased to be a means of physical development and
needs to be offset by compensating modes of activity. Many
labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of the
problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy.
Under present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better
in the future. Healthy natural industries will be less and less open
to the young. This is the new situation that now confronts those
concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is
lost.
Some of the results of these conditions are seen in average
measurements of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control.
Despite the excellence of the few, the testimony of those most
familiar with the bodies of children and adults, and their physical
powers, gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life that,
without a wide-spread motor revival, can bode only degeneration for
our nation and our race. The number of common things that can not be
done at all; the large proportion of our youth who must be exempted
from any kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the thin limbs,
collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak hearts,
lungs, eyes, puny and bad muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways,
automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of
impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only
too necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long
neglect of the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers,
and perhaps the most important for his well-being. If the unfaithful
stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to
strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be
smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and
arrest of growth; if they were brought to realize how they are fallen
beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and
how great their need of physical salvation, we might hope again for a
physical renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has seen but twice or
perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three of the
brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the
advancement of the kingdom of man. A vast body of evidence could be
collected from the writings of anthropologists showing how superior
unspoiled savages are to civilized man in correct or esthetic
proportions of body, in many forms of endurance of fatigue, hardship,
and power to bear exposure, in the development and preservation of
teeth and hair, in keenness of senses, absence of deformities, as well
as immunity to many of our diseases. Their women are stronger and bear
hardship and exposure, monthly periods and childbirth, better.
Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a
disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater
average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ
diseases.
The progressive realization of these tendencies has prompted most of
the best recent and great changes motor-ward in education and also in
personal regimen. Health- and strength-giving agencies have put to
school the large motor areas of the brain, so long neglected, and have
vastly enlarged their scope. Thousands of youth are now inspired with
new enthusiasm for physical development; and new institutions of many
kinds and grades have arisen, with a voluminous literature, unnumbered
specialists, specialties, new apparatus, tests, movements, methods,
and theories; and the press, the public, and the church are awakened
to a fresh interest in the body and its powers. All this is
magnificent, but sadly inadequate to cope with the new needs and
dangers, which are vastly greater.
[Footnote 1: Dieterich. Göttingen, 1886.]
[Footnote 2: See Chap. xii.]
[Footnote 3: F. Burk in From Fundamental to Accessory. Pedagogical
Seminary, Oct., 1898, vol. 6, pp. 5-64.]
[Footnote 4: Creeping and Walking, by A.W. Trettien. American Journal
of Psychology, October, 1900, vol. 12, pp. 1-57.]
[Footnote 5: A Morning Observation of a Baby. Pedagogical Seminary,
December 1901, vol. 8, pp. 469-481.]
[Footnote 6: Kate Carman. Notes on School Activity. Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 106-117.]
[Footnote 7: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp.
491-517.]
[Footnote 8: G.E. Johnson. Psychology and Pegagogy of Feeble-Minded
Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, vol. 3, pp. 246-301.]
[Footnote 9: Dr. Hughlings Jackson, the eminent English pathologist,
was the first to make practical application of the evolutionary theory
of the nervous system to the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsies and
mental diseases. The practical success of this application was so
great that the Hughlings-Jackson "three-level theory" is now the
established basis of English diagnosis. He conceived the nervous
mechanism as composed of three systems, arranged in the form of a
hierarchy, the higher including the lower, and yet each having a
certain degree of independence. The first level represents the type of
simplest reflex and involuntary movement and is localized in the gray
matter of the spinal cord, medulla, and pons. The second, or middle
level, comprises those structures which receive sensory impulses from
the cells of the lowest level instead of directly from the periphery
or the non-nervous tissues. The motor cells of this middle level also
discharge into the motor mechanisms of the lowest level. Jackson
located these middle level structures in the cortex of the central
convolutions, the basal ganglia and the centers of the special senses
in the cortex. The highest level bears the same relation to the middle
level that it bears to the lowest i.e., no continuous connection
between the highest and the lowest is assumed; the structures of the
middle level mediate between them as a system of relays. According to
this hierarchical arrangement of the nervous system, the lowest level
which is the simplest and oldest "contains the mechanism for the
simple fundamental movements in reflexes and involuntary reactions.
The second level regroups these simple movements by combinations and
associations of cortical structure in wider, more complex mechanisms,
producing a higher class of movements. The highest level unifies the
whole nervous system and, according to Jackson, is the anatomical
basis of mind."
For a fuller account of this theory see Burk: From Fundamental to
Accessory in the Nervous System and of Movements. Pedagogical
Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 6, pp. 17-23.]
[Footnote 10: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of
Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp.
491-517.]
[Footnote 11: Encyclopedia of Social Reform, Funk and Wagnalls, 1896,
p. 1095]
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