Slavophiles are addicted to the military mania, and this form
of their belief is more dangerously reactionary than its
ordinary phase. Many of these belong to the bureaucratic caste.
Official Russia holds aloft the eagle; human Russia the dove.
Official Russia leads the anti-Jewish massacres; human Russia
is very little responsible for pogroms. Ignatieff, "Father of
Lies," a bureaucrat of the military Pan-Slavic breed, about
1882, began the worst persecutions against the Jews in the last
generation, and possibly Pobiedonosteff, the late procurator of
the Holy Synod, was the worst offender in this one. The
peaceful feelings of the masses of the people, however, do not
sanction these outbreaks, and Slavophilism of such a sort is
not the philosophy of the Russian heart, no matter how many
pogroms may be enumerated.
It is therefore to human Russia that one must look for the true
feelings of the people; to their faith and deeds, to the
humility of their devotions, and prostrations before their
numberless shrines and ikons, to their religious ceremonies in
the open fields for huge detachments of the army, to the
thousands of their yearly pilgrims to Jerusalem, to their
superstitions, their poverty and long-suffering, all of which
attest innate passive endurance and non-resistance, and show
their kind of Slavophilism, which all in all, is much more than
"mere reverence for barbarism."
The war-time excitement in their cities seemed characteristic
of this national soul: "Russia is the Mother of Servia" was the
street cry of the marching throngs. It might be added that the
word mother, "matushka," is a prevalent one in expressing their
feelings. They call their greatest river the "Mother Volga."
Conquering Rome said "Father Tiber" and the native warriors of
this continent called the Mississippi the "Father of Waters."
The difference in these appellations shows the tender quality
of the Russian soul, whose ardent sympathies in July, 1914,
were greatly aroused by the spectacle of a large nation
attacking a small one, notwithstanding whatever may be said to
justify that deed.
Finally, however, let it be added, that the one thing that will
recreate Russia in the image of the west, is capital. Once let
the vast sums that have invaded Muscovy be put, not to the
autocratic purpose of the official rulers, but into factories,
mines, city subways and transportation of all kinds,
irrigation, canals, agricultural implements and to other
productive uses, then capitalistic Russia will stand forth
shorn of the Slavophilic simplicities of non-resistance and
humility. Labor wars, practically unknown hitherto, yet now
beginning, will occur in much greater number and the peasant
class, still unified, will be torn asunder by differences in
wealth and interests; the middle class, now very small, will
grow to large proportions, and many destructive forces will
come upon the land which has hitherto mocked western Europe
because of their presence there.
The many centuries of peasant unity, with its beauty of
brotherhood, affection and communal interests, will come to an
end under such a new regime. Already competitive forces are
dissolving communism in land, and many of the old beauties of
Russia are disappearing. Capitalism will bring with it much
turmoil and strife, unhappiness and death, but also the dawn of
brighter hours; newer and better cities, cleaner water, better
food, houses and clothes, and after the stress of its first
attack is over, and Russia has evolved laws and means to
control and socialize the invader, it may be that the old
simplicities and beauties of life will return, and a greater
and holier Russia will arise, still able to teach and aid in
the regeneration of the rest of the world.
PHYSICAL TRAINING AS MENTAL TRAINING
BY DR. J. H. McBRIDE
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
THE first duty of a people is to provide for the health of its
children. The possible human value of any country fifty years
ahead depends chiefly upon what is done by and for its
children. They are the future in the making.
History seems to justify the statement of Professor Tyler[1]
that conquering races have been physically strong races, and
that nations have failed when they became degenerate.
[1] Growth and Education," J. M. Tyler.
Dionysius, speaking of the advantage of virility in a nation,
said,
It is a law of Nature common to all mankind, which no time
shall annul or destroy, that those who have more strength and
excellence shall bear rule over those who have less.
This law applies equally to individuals. Skill, cunning and
reason play their part, but the animal quality of endurance is
always back of these and is often decisive in a contest.
Darwin said he had difficulty in applying the law of the
survival of the fittest to the facts of the destruction of
Greece until it occurred to him that in this instance the
strongest was the fittest. Civilized people's have been
destroyed by ruder races that were physically superior.
The children that are now in our schools will take to adult
life such foundation as heredity has furnished, with the
equipment that society may care to add. We of this day have no
greater obligation than to prepare these children mentally and
physically for the duties that maturity may bring. Man did not
escape the physical necessities of the body when he became
civilized; the advantages of health are as great to-day as when
our forebears lived in tents. Very few of the primitive man's
activities are left; what he did regularly and from necessity
we do incidentally, and usually for sport, and yet the demands
upon the energies of man have not been lessened, they have only
been changed in form.
Our educational authorities, though in many instances
interested in physical development of the young, have not given
the subject the important place in their program that it
deserves. This is not wholly due to indifference, but largely
to their ideals that were derived from classical-ascetic
standards.
In the medieval ideal the human body was animal and sinful, to
be despised and repressed. The mind was said to be the
spiritual element in man, representing the immortal part of his
nature, and therefore was the only part worthy of attention in
an educational system. From the fall of the Roman empire to the
later nineteenth century this ideal dominated education.
The medieval universities, including Oxford and Cambridge,
provided only for mental training. Their education was intended
for those who were to follow the professions or to become
scholars or gentlemen of leisure. Education was not intended to
prepare the great mass of men for the every-day work of life.
While only indirectly related to my subject, it is interesting
to recall that there was in this country in the early
nineteenth century much opposition to the establishment of
common schools for the masses. It was claimed that those who
belonged to the working classes did not need to be educated.
Our own colleges and universities were originally founded on
the old classical-ascetic model, so that the spirit of the
medieval period survived in the educational plan of this
country. It is only in recent decades that these institutions
have begun to depart from the older, formal, classical methods
that made education a privilege of the few, the average man
being deprived of the advantages of the training that he
needed. Because of this the humble millions of men and women
who wove and spun, and fed and housed the world were left out
of the educational scheme.
Some years ago a London weekly paper, which speaks for the
conservative class of England, in discussing certain suggested
innovations in English higher education, said that the great
merit of education at Oxford and Cambridge was that it was
"absolutely useless." By this it was probably meant that the
education was for a chosen few, was not intended to prepare men
for the practical work of life and was essentially and only an
intellectual and cultural training.
The change of attitude that is seen in our day is due chiefly
to two great discoveries: the re-discovery of the human body
and its relation to our mentality and the discovery of the mind
of the child and youth. We have found that man is an animal who
graduated from caves and dugouts and to whom even barbarism was
a lade and great achievement. That the human body was made by
the experiences of that rude life, and that since then we have
made no change in it except to stand on two feet. Neither have
we added one nerve cell or fiber to our brains since the day
when the cave was home and uncooked food the daily diet.
The conception of man as an animal has led to a study of him as
such. Educators as a class now concede that the physical man
must be considered as an essential part of their scheme, that
the brain is an organ of the body among other organs, and is
subject to the same laws and influenced by similar conditions.
The influence of the mind upon the body is a commonplace of
psychology, but the influence of the body upon the mind is of
equal importance, though less frequently emphasized.
Whatever one's theory of the nature of mind, it must be
considered in relation to the brain as the organ of its
expression. The mind has, too, a broader base than the brain,
for every organ of the body has some share in the mental
functions. Every physician knows that physical disease lowers
the quality of the thinking and, with the exception of a few
geniuses like Darwin and Leopardi, it makes impossible
intellectual work of a high order. Disorders of the internal
organs rob the brain of nourishment and weaken it, and by
obtruding their morbidness upon it they batter down its
resistances and lower the thinking power.
Though we can never know the history of man's origin, the lives
of the child and of the wild man help us to understand
something of the order of racial development. All the higher
mental faculties grow in the child as they grew in the
race--out of impulse, instinct, feeling; and from infancy to
maturity we recapitulate mentally and physically the early
human-making stages, short circuiting in twenty years the
race-process.
The life of physical activity that the child leads develops and
coordinates the brain and the muscular system. In this way the
great motor functions are organized in the brain and become
part of the physical basis of mind.
The older education that trained the intellect exclusively,
without reference to the practical demands of life or the needs
of the body, was inadequate in that it ignored the law of
thinking and doing. It is true that there is much to its
credit, as many fine spirits have testified. They at least
survived it.
Stanley Hall says "we think in terms of muscular movement," and
this expresses the most important single fact in the mature
mentality. That the mind is largely constituted of memories of
muscular movements is basic in development.
The muscles are the special organs of volition, the one part of
the body that the mind can directly command and act on. The
muscles are preeminently the mind's instruments, the visible
and moving part of its machinery. They are thought carriers,
and during the growth period their functional activities are
organized into the mental life. This is why "we think in terms
of muscular movement," and why muscular training supplies a
natural need of the developing mind.
The normal boy says little or nothing of what he thinks, but
much of what he is doing or intends to do. He has the motor
mind, the instinct for doing things by which he builds the
brain and body. It is nature's way of laying the foundation in
the individual as by the more tedious process of evolution she
laid it in the race. The mental development of the normal
infant is indicated by the increasing accuracy and delicacy of
muscular coordination. The feeble-minded child very early shows
its mental defect in the clumsy use of its muscles. Because of
the functional relation of the voluntary muscles and the
mentality, physical training is in a large degree mental
training. When by such training we give dexterity to muscles of
the growing person we are making possible better mental
development; that is, because of this relation of the mind to
action there is a direct mental discipline in the thought-out
processes of physical activity. If, then, we make physical
development a part of our educational process, we are taking
advantage of race tendencies, we are starting the individual as
nature started the race; we are laying the foundation in the
individual as it was originally laid in the race; we are
building as the race built.
Exclusively intellectual training may be sufficient for the
genius or for the few who have great initiative and
intellectual self-confidence, but for the great mass of boys
and girls this training is not sufficient. It does not prepare
the young for the kind of work that three fourths of them will
have to do. We are now beginning to recognize this and through
manual training, vocational guidance, etc., we are teaching
boys and girls how to do things, and this, too, has the
additional merit of being, in a measure, physical training.
Educators, until recently, have, in emphasizing the paramount
importance of mental training, lost sight of the needs of the
body. Their classical ideals and formal methods made dead
languages, mathematics, philosophy etc., the school diet of
boys whose normal hunger was for action, and for learning by
doing.
Sir William Hamilton, who wrote fairy tales in metaphysics for
a generation of Scotchmen, placed these lines over the doorway
of his lecture room.
In earth there 's nothing great but Man;
In Man there 's nothing great but Mind.
This sounds well, but it is poor philosophy. There is much in
earth that is great besides man and much in man that is great
besides his mind. The older type of metaphysician with his
staggering vocabulary and his bag of "categories" has now
chiefly a historic interest. In the modern view the
interdependence of mind and body is a fundamental fact of life.
As science reveals the physiologic marvels of the once despised
body, the latter grows in our respect, for we find that its
seeming humble functions are intimately related to our highest
powers. Sir William's couplet gives a hint of the dominance of
the classical method of his day. It overemphasized the
importance of reason and too often converted the youthful mind
into a rag bag of useless information. The educators of that
time and since have thought more highly of human reason than
experience justifies. With their medieval bias for a world of
will and reason, they drove the young with the whip and spur of
emulation toward what to them seemed the one possible goal,
intellectual achievement.
We exaggerate the share that reason has in conduct. In the
history of the race, which is epitomized in the life of every
individual, reason was a late outgrowth of feeling, passion,
impulse, instinct. It was these older faculties that ruled the
life of the primitive man who made the race, and it was through
them that the race gradually rose to reason by what Emerson
would call the "spiral stairway of development."
These functions of impulse and instinct dominate the life of
the child and they are only a little less potent in the conduct
of us grownups. Much of what we call reason is feeling, and
much of our life activities are due to desire, sentiment,
instinct and habit, which, under the illusion of reason,
determine our decisions and conduct. Some one has said that
reason is the light that nature has placed at the tip of
instinct, and it is certainly true that without these earlier,
basal faculties reason would be a feeble light. During the
growing period these are specially strong, and the important
thing is that they be guided and organized in relation to the
needs of maturity. In combining mental and physical training we
are in some measure furnishing this guidance, doing
intentionally what nature did originally without design.
In the uncivilized state the stress of life was chiefly
physical. The civilized man has to a large degree reversed this
old order, in that the use of the body is incidental in his
work, the stress being placed upon the brain. He piles his life
high with complexities and in place of life being for
necessities, and they few and simple, it is largely for
comforts which we call necessities, and Professor Huxley has
said that the struggle for comforts is more cruel than the
struggle for existence.
This stress which is put upon conscious effort in civilization
places a new and severe tax upon the brain. It intensifies and
narrows the range of man's activities; it causes him to
specialize and localize the strain to a degree that may be
dangerous. It is certainly true that every man has his breaking
strain, and there is nothing that will raise the limit of
endurance like a strong and well-developed body.
The Italian physiologist, Mosso, showed by an ingenious device
that when a person lying quite still was required to add a
column of figures, blood left the extremities and flowed toward
the brain. Any emotional state or effort of thought produces
the same result. This demonstration that we think to our
fingers' ends suggests the importance of a strong body as a
prompt support in mental work.
All our work, mental as well as physical, is a test of
endurance, not a test that is spiritual and non-material, but
even in the sphere of the mind it is plainly animal and
physical. Thinking is primarily a physical process and draws
upon the vital stores of every organ. The energy that makes
clear thinking possible depends largely upon the vigor of the
body, and to the extent that this fails, the brain functions
suffer. Therefore, any work, mental or physical, will be better
done and more easily done if the body is strong. Other things
being equal, the intellectual work of the strong man will be
better done than similar work by one of equal talent, but who
is not strong.
Big muscles are not necessary in physical development. Many
people are not designed for big muscles, and any attempt by
them to produce a heavy, massive development may do harm. What
is wanted is vigor, skill, muscular readiness and a reawakening
of the old associations of thought and action. Such training
goes further than thought and action, for it reaches all the
organs and adds immensely to the vital capacity and working
power of the individual.
The play instinct of the child is as old as the race, or older,
and is a vitally important factor, not only in physical
development, but also in mental development. In its destructive
and disorderly activities the child shows the later adult
forces in the formative stage. Old instincts and movements that
were once self-preservative and of serious meaning to a wild
ancestor reappear in the play of children, and, utilized
wisely, may under new form become a valuable possession of the
adult. There is a great big man, in fact, several possible men,
inside every boy. Through his running, jumping, fighting,
swimming, through impulse, instincts and emotions he is seeking
the man that is in him, and it is by this turbulent and
experimental course that he finally comes to the order of
maturity.
Every boy is a vitally coiled up set of springs pressing to be
released. Race-old energies are struggling in him for
expression, and play is the normal way to satisfy the great
demand. The child may miss some important things and yet get
on, but it can not, without severe and lasting harm miss the
instinctive activities of play.
In play and games the young are re-enacting these old muscular
coordinations and developing mind and body on the old
foundation. The boy's love of outdoor sports and the adventures
of hunting are significant. Those ancestors of ours who hunted
and fished and shaped with care their arrow heads were
developing a manual skill and thinking power that we inherit.
We use our muscles for more varied and possibly more finished
purposes, but it is through the patience and practise of their
rude lives that we possess the delicate uses of the hands and
the finer dexterities of the mind.
The boy who goes whistling to the fields, or hunts, or fishes,
or swims, is unconsciously reaching out toward later life and
is preparing for serious and bigger things.
The growing formative period of life is the time for good
physical development. Whatever is gained and fixed then is
permanent, as it becomes a part of the physiological habits of
the individual. The years before twenty decide the future
energy stores, and the capacity to endure. Every function
enlarged, every gain of power, is additional storage room for
energy, to be drawn upon in the coming days of adult stress.
Good physical development not only gives strength and skill in
the use of the body, but develops a physiological habit of
surplus power that may be called quantity of energy. Life is
not alone in quality, in delicacy of adjustment, in accuracy,
in fineness of feeling; it is also in quantity. The poet who,
with frail physique and feeble pulse, sits in his quiet retreat
and puts his fine fancies into the rhythms of verse has
quality. But in the stress and rivalry of life that awaits the
majority of men, there is a need for quantity of energy, such
as enabled a Washington or a Caesar or a Napoleon or a
Wellington to shoulder his way through difficulties. These men
combined quality with quantity and this combination may make,
and often does make, the life of masterful achievement. The
quantity of energy in us average men may make the difference
between success and failure.
Many men fail in life for lack of staying power, for lack of
that kind of endurance that is furnished by having power in
reserve.
The strong, confident person who has strength to spare,
reserves of energy, does his work easily and without friction.
Half the timidities and indecisions of men are chargeable less
to lack of ability than to lack of the physical vigor, the
QUANTITY of energy, which is the driving power of character. In
all the contests of life an important element in success is the
ability to endure prolonged stress, to have the reserve energy
that can be drawn upon and utilized as a driving force. This
power is not alone necessary in the emergencies, the "short
hauls" of life, but also in the long hauls that spread the
strain through greater periods. Many of the failures of life
are due as much to lack of ability to meet prolonged stress as
to lack of experience or intelligence. Men of moderate ability
but with great powers of endurance often succeed, while men of
greater talent fail for lack of the ability to endure strain.
The man with a weak body and without the self-confidence that
surplus energy gives is liable to be of uncertain judgment.
Such a man in the presence of a problem requiring quick
decision, doubts and hesitates and stands shivering on the
brink of action while hastening opportunities pass him by.
Much of the loose thinking of our time is undoubtedly due to
poor educational drill. In fact the failure of the schools to
teach pupils how to apply the mind and how to think is one of
their common reproaches. Inability to use the mind effectively
is also frequently due to a lack of vigor and physical stamina.
A person with poor digestion, or under-developed body, or weak
circulation has of necessity a badly nourished brain. Such a
brain, unless it belongs to a genius, will do poor thinking.
The mentally trained person who is also physically strong has
the combination that puts his powers at easy command. He can be
joyously busy doing the impossible because the doing of it has
been made easy by training.
How much native power there is in all of us that for want of
proper training or sympathetic encouragement never comes to
maturity! How many of the finer qualities of character that,
for want of a kindlier climate of cheerful companionship and
wise direction, failed to mature and now lie dead in us! Very
many people are only partly alive. A large part, and in some,
the best part, is dead. The capacity they show is probably only
a small share of a fine inheritance which, not knowing how to
use, they allowed to die.
We have an instinctive liking for people who are strong and
healthy. They appeal to us by their robustness and their
confident display of energy. We do not now need the big muscles
that were once necessary in wielding spear and battle-axe. We
need, however, as much as the race ever needed well-developed
bodies and habits of health.