A way of life : $b An address to Yale students Sunday evening, April 20th, 1913Osler, William, Sir
Philosophy
A way of life : $b An address to Yale students Sunday evening, April 20th, 1913
Osler, William, Sir
Conduct of life; Students -- Conduct of life
Professor Marsh would diagnose an unknown animal from a single bone,
so can the day be predicted from the first waking hour. The start is
everything, as you well know, and to make a good start you must feel
fit. In the young, sensations of morning slackness come most often
from lack of control of the two primal instincts--biologic
habits--the one concerned with the preservation of the individual,
the other with the continuance of the species. Yale students should
by this time be models of dietetic propriety, but youth does not
always reck the rede of the teacher; and I dare say that here, as
elsewhere, careless habits of eating are responsible for much mental
disability. My own rule of life has been to cut out unsparingly any
article of diet that had the bad taste to disagree with me, or to
indicate in any way that it had abused the temporary hospitality of
the lodging which I had provided. To drink, nowadays, but few
students become addicted, but in every large body of men a few are to
be found whose incapacity for the day results from the morning
clogging of nocturnally-flushed tissues. As moderation is very hard
to reach, and as it has been abundantly shown that the best of mental
and physical work may be done without alcohol in any form, the safest
rule for the young man is that which I am sure most of you
follow--abstinence. A bitter enemy to the bright eye and the clear
brain of the early morning is tobacco when smoked to excess, as it is
now by a large majority of students. Watch it, test it, and if need
be, control it. That befogged, woolly sensation reaching from the
forehead to the occiput, that haziness of memory, that cold fish-like
eye, that furred tongue, and last week's taste in the mouth--too many
of you know them--I know them--they often come from too much tobacco.
The other primal instinct is the heavy burden of the flesh which
Nature puts on all of us to ensure a continuation of the species. To
drive Plato's team taxes the energies of the best of us. One of the
horses is a raging, untamed devil, who can only be brought into
subjection by hard fighting and severe training. This much you all
know as men: once the bit is between his teeth the black steed
Passion will take the white horse Reason with you and the chariot
rattling over the rocks to perdition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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