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
make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to
proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the
neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements.
Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this
change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those
who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised
time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of
consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope,
all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the
sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good
ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods--and all, as I
am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements
which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time
marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took
precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming
later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic
feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make
poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack,
gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows
its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war,
love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the parent
of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music
is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only
in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not
move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on
stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging
as a compound pendulum.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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