Health results from moderation, gayety and the absence of care. Eternal wisdom has ordained, that the emotions which disturb our days, are those which have a natural tendency to shorten them.[16]
If there were ground for a single charge against the justice of nature, it would be, that the errors of inexperience seem punished with too great severity. We prodigally waste the material of life and enjoyment, as we do our other possessions, as if we thought it inexhaustible.
To the errors of youth succeed the vices of mature age. Ambition and cupidity, envy and hatred concur to devour the very aliment of life. The storms which prostrate the moral faculties, equally sap the physical energy. Every debasing passion is a consuming poison. To what other source of evil can we assign those inquietudes and puerile anxieties, which disturb the days of the greater portion of mankind? They are occupied by trifling interests, and agitated by vain debates. They watch for futile excitements, and are in desolation from chimerical troubles. Pleasant emotions sustain life, and produce upon it the effect of a gentle current of air upon flame. Trains of thought habitually elevated, and sometimes inclined to revery, impart pure and true gayety to the soul. To be able to command this train is one of the rarest felicities of endowment. A distinguished physician recorded in his tablets the apparent paradox, that three quarters of men die of vexation or grief.
Huffland has published a work, upon the art of prolonging life, full of interesting observations. ‘Philosophers,’ says he, ‘enjoy a delightful leisure. Their thoughts, generally estranged from vulgar interests, have nothing in common with those afflicting ideas, with which other men are continually agitated and corroded. Their reflections are agreeable by their variety, their vague liberty, and sometimes even by their frivolity. Devoted to the pursuits of their choice, the occupations of their taste, they dispose freely of their time. Oftentimes they surround themselves with young people, that their natural vivacity may be communicated to them, and, in some sort, produce a renewal of their youth.’ We may make a distinction between the different kinds of philosophy, in relation to their influence upon the duration of life. Those which direct the mind towards sublime contemplations, even were they in some degree superstitious, such as those of Pythagoras and Plato, are the most salutary. Next to them, I place those, the study of which, embracing nature, gives enlarged and elevated ideas upon infinity, the stars, the wonders of the universe, the heroic virtues, and other similar subjects. Such were those of Democritus, Philolaus, Xenophanes, the Stoics, and the ancient astronomers.’
‘I may cite next those less profound thinkers, who instead of exacting difficult researches, seemed destined only to amuse the mind; the followers of which philosophy, deviating wide from vulgar opinion, peaceably sustain the arguments for and against the propositions advanced. Such was the philosophy of Carneades and the Academicians, to whom we may add the Grammarians and Rhetoricians.’
‘But those which turn only upon painful subtilties, which are affirmative, dogmatic and positive, which bend all facts and opinions to form and adjust them to certain preconceived principles and invariable measures; in fine, such as are thorny, arid, narrow and contentious, these are fatal in tendency, and cannot but abridge the life of those, who cultivate them. Of this class was the philosophy of the Peripatetics, and that also of the Scholastics.’
Tumultuous passions and corroding cares are two sources of evil influences, which philosophy avoids. Another influence, adverse to life, is that mental feebleness, which renders persons perpetually solicitous about their health, effeminate and unhappy. Fixing their thoughts intensely on the functions of life, those functions, that are subjects of this anxious inspection, labor. Imagining themselves sick, they soon become so. The undoubting confidence that we shall not be sick, is perhaps the best prophylactic for preserving health.
I am ignorant of the exact influence of moral upon physical action, in relation to health. But of this I am confident, that it is prodigious; that physicians have not made it a sufficient element in their calculations, or employed it as they should; and that in future, under a wise and more philosophic direction, it may operate an immense result, both in restoring and preserving health.
A man reads a letter, which announces misfortunes, or sinister events. His head turns. His appetite ceases. He becomes faint, and oppressed; and his life is in danger. No contagion, however, no physical blow has touched him. A thought has palsied his forces in a moment; and has successively deranged every spring of life. We have read of persons of feeble and uninformed mind, who have fallen sick, in consequence of the cruel sport of those, who have ingeniously alarmed their imagination, and cautiously indicated to them a train of fatal symptoms. Since imagination can thus certainly overturn our physical powers, why may it not, under certain regulations, restore them? Among the numberless recorded cases of cures, reputed miraculous, it is probable, that a great part may be accounted for on this principle.[17]