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.