Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that
the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral
momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the
combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice
raucous with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are
hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as yet no good key. Many
elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze
them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint
things we can not apprehend. Later the rehearsals are fuller, and
their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the
correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is
always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current
of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral
joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our
play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges
our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its
traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from
play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is
prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of
youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible
characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of
play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and
muscles know it not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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