Self Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and PerseveranceSmiles, Samuel
Philosophy
Self Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance
Smiles, Samuel
Conduct of life
Daniel Malthus urged his son when at college to be most diligent in the
cultivation of knowledge, but he also enjoined him to pursue manly sports
as the best means of keeping up the full working power of his mind, as
well as of enjoying the pleasures of intellect. “Every kind of
knowledge,” said he, “every acquaintance with nature and art, will amuse
and strengthen your mind, and I am perfectly pleased that cricket should
do the same by your arms and legs; I love to see you excel in exercises
of the body, and I think myself that the better half, and much the most
agreeable part, of the pleasures of the mind is best enjoyed while one is
upon one’s legs.” But a still more important use of active employment is
that referred to by the great divine, Jeremy Taylor. “Avoid idleness,”
he says, “and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful
employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses where the soul
is unemployed and the body is at ease; for no easy, healthful, idle
person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but of all employments
bodily labour is the most useful, and of the greatest benefit for driving
away the devil.”
Practical success in life depends more upon physical health than is
generally imagined. Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse, writing home to a friend
in England, said, “I believe, if I get on well in India, it will be
owing, physically speaking, to a sound digestion.” The capacity for
continuous working in any calling must necessarily depend in a great
measure upon this; and hence the necessity for attending to health, even
as a means of intellectual labour. It is perhaps to the neglect of
physical exercise that we find amongst students so frequent a tendency
towards discontent, unhappiness, inaction, and reverie,—displaying itself
in contempt for real life and disgust at the beaten tracks of men,—a
tendency which in England has been called Byronism, and in Germany
Wertherism. Dr. Channing noted the same growth in America, which led him
to make the remark, that “too many of our young men grow up in a school
of despair.” The only remedy for this green-sickness in youth is
physical exercise—action, work, and bodily occupation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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