Health Through Will PowerWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Science
Health Through Will Power
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Mental healing; Mental health; Will
But there are other and even more important phases of the prolongation
of life by the will that still better illustrates its power. {9} It
has often been noted that men who have had extremely busy lives,
working long hours every day, often sleeping only a few hours at
night, turning from one thing to another and accomplishing so much
that it seemed almost impossible that one man could do all they did,
have lived very long lives. Men like Alexander Humboldt, for instance,
distinguished in science in his younger life, a traveler for many
years in that hell-hole of the tropics, the region around Panama and
Central America, a great writer whose books deeply influenced his
generation in middle age. Prime Minister of Prussia as an older man,
lived to be past ninety, though he once confessed that in his forties
he often slept but two or three hours a night and sometimes took even
that little rest on a sofa instead of a bed. Leo XIII at the end of
the nineteenth century was just such another man. Frail of body,
elected Pope at sixty-four, it was thought that there would soon be
occasion for another election; he did an immense amount of work,
assumed successfully the heaviest responsibilities, and outlived the
years of Peter in the Papal chair, breaking all the prophecies in that
regard and not dying till he was ninety-three.
Many other examples might be cited. {10} Gladstone, always at work,
probably the greatest statesman of the nineteenth century in the
better sense of that word, was a scholar almost without a peer in the
breadth of his scholarly attainments, a most interesting writer on
multitudinous topics, keen of interest for everything human and always
active, and yet he lived well on into the eighties. Bismarck and Von
Moltke, who assumed heavier responsibilities than almost any other men
of the nineteenth century, saw their fourscore years pass over them a
good while before the end came. Bismarck remarked on his eighty-first
birthday that he used to think all the good things of life were
confined to the first eighty years of life, but now he knew that there
were a great many good things reserved for the second eighty years. I
shall never forget sitting beside Thomas Dunn English, the American
poet, at a banquet of the Alumni of the University of Pennsylvania,
when he repeated this expression for us; at the time he himself was
well past eighty. He too had been a busy man and yet rejoiced to be
with the younger alumni at the dinner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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