The grey matter of the brain--the medium of Mind--wherein arise imagination, inspiration and those noble talents and the noble dreams of enterprise which make for noble lives--this highest and most complex of the human tissue-cells becomes starved and atrophied from continued waste of brain-resources by those lower-grade cerebral motor-tracts which control and energise the muscles. The popular impression, both lay and medical, that muscular exertion supplies rest to the brain and recuperation to the nervous system, is a sad delusion. One cannot raise a finger without expending brain and nervous force, the muscles being implements by way of which the brain transforms purpose into action--being _brain_-implements therefore. So that brains--and particularly young brains--unduly taxed by muscular activities are robbed of power to develop or to function in their intellectual and other higher departments. If my hypothesis be true, and the right side of the body with its allied brain-hemisphere is the executive and expenditure side, while the left is the Life and asset side, it is obvious that excessive brain-work, or Sports, for which the executive power is supplied by this right side and its allied brain half, must necessarily deplete and exhaust the left side, which is the power-house and reservoir of Life and Mind whence the executive half derives its mental, nervous and vital potential. It goes without saying that such careful economy of the powers is superfluous in truly healthful and normally vigorous males. But latter-day stock has been, for the most part, so far depleted by generations of neglect of natural law as to require the strictest husbandry of its vital expenditure, in order to apportion its means to the best all-round advantage. Object-lessons in such extremes of athleticism as destroy the normal balance of the counter-poising Sex-traits have been supplied by War. The faces--as the natures--of some of our soldiers have become crude, coarse and deteriorate in intelligence, others abnormally harsh and fierce; the softer human qualities having been trampled out of them by stress of militarism, some to degrees of brutalisation and criminality, even. While a very great number show lined and haggard from heart or nervous strain. CHAPTER IV THE WOMAN BRAIN: ITS POWERS AND DISABILITIES "_My state is like the lightning's light-- Now it shines forth, and now 'tis gone from sight. At times, amid the heavens I find my seat; At others, I am lower than my feet._" Sa'di (Persian poet). I Of what order is this Woman-half of Mind which Feminism seeks to extinguish? * * * * * The cerebral processes appreciable upon the Outer plane, and calculable by Science, represent no more than a tithe of brain-activities. They are but a single highly-specialised focus of brain-functioning.