Chapter 1

A Lecture On Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development,

delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn., August 20, 1858.

By S.R. Calthrop, of Bridgeport, Conn., Formerly of Trinity College, Cambridge, England.

MDCCCLIX.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by Ticknor And Fields, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

On motion of G.F. Thayer,--_Voted_, unanimously, That five thousand copies of Mr. Calthrop's Lecture be printed at the expense of the Institute, for gratuitous circulation.

LECTURE.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:--

We have met together to consider the best methods of Educating, that is, drawing out, or developing the Human Nature common to all of us. Truly a subject not easy to be exhausted. For we all of us feel that the Human Nature,--out of whose bosom has flowed all history, all science, all poetry, all art, all life in short,--contains within itself far more than that which has hitherto been manifested through all the periods of its history, though that history dates from the creation of the world, and has already progressed as far as the nineteenth century of the Christian era. Yes! we all of us feel that the land of promise lies far away in the future, that the goal of human history is yet a long way off.

A large portion of this assembly consists of those whose business it is to study Human Nature in all its various forms, and who have taken upon themselves the task of developing that nature in the youth of America, in that rising generation whose duty it will be to carry out the nascent projects of reform in every department of human interest, and make the thought of to-day the fact of tomorrow.

Some doubtless there are among this number, who by very nature are born Teachers, called to this office, as by a voice from heaven! Men, who in spite of foolish detraction, or yet more foolish patronage, understand the dignity, the true nobility of their calling; who know that the office of the teacher is coëval with the world; and also feel with true prophetic foresight, that the world, fifty years hence, will be very much what its Teachers intend, by God's blessing, to make it.

Brothers in a high calling! The speaker, proudly enrolling himself in the number of your noble band, greets you from his heart this day, and invites you to spend a thoughtful hour with him; and to help him, by your best wishes, to unfold in a manner not wholly unworthy of his theme, some small portion of the nature and method of Human Development.

Ours is the age of analysis. We begin to see that before we can understand a substance, it is necessary to become acquainted with all its component parts. Thus, then, with regard to Human Nature, we must understand all at least of its grand divisions, before we can comprehend the method of developing it as a whole.

Let us then say, that there are five grand divisions in Human Nature,--the physical, the intellectual, the affectional, the moral, and the devotional,--or in other words, that man has body, mind, heart, conscience, and soul.

Concerning these great divisions, I shall assert, _first_, that they are all mutually dependent upon each other; that if one of them suffer, all the others suffer with it; that man is dwarfed and incomplete, unless he is fully developed in all the five: and, _secondly_, as my special subject, I maintain that physical well-being, health of body, is therefore necessary not only to the complete development of Human Nature, but that it is also essential to a happy and harmonious development of each one of the four other great divisions of Human Nature; or in other words, I assert the body has something to do both with the mind, heart, conscience, and soul of man, not merely to all these collectively, but also to each of them separately.

First, then, I shall speak on the mutual dependence of the faculties.

Now, although it is not possible that any faculty should be so completely isolated, as to act without moving any of the rest at all; nevertheless, since a comparative isolation and separation of the faculties is but too common, let us glance through the history of the past, and mark any notable instances of such isolation; and if we find that a one-sided development has always proved a failure, we shall begin to discern the folly of trying such disastrous experiments over again, specially since they would have to be made upon living human beings, upon he young children of the rising generation, who cannot resent our folly, but whose distorted natures will be living proofs of our incapacity, of our impotence as educators, when the experiment tried for the thousand and first time fails yet again, as it always has done, and always will do to the world's end, while Human Nature remains the same.

Let us then take a few examples, which are not intended to stand the test of severe criticism, but which are only used as illustrations of the idea which we are now considering.

Let us then first suppose that the devotional element in man acts alone. The experiment has already been tried. Many a hermit in lonely cell or rocky cavern, has cut himself off from the society of men, from action, duty and love, in order that he may be devout without hindrance. How many such men have poured out their souls upon the ground, on barren sand or desert rock, souls which might have watered thousands with the dew of heaven, and all because they made one fatal life-mistake;--they thought, that to pray always meant to be always saying prayers.

Who could be more devout than Saint Simeon Stylites? who spent all his life upon the top of a tall pillar, absorbed in contemplation, ecstasy, remorse and prayer. Let the poet speak for him.

"Bethink thee, Lord? while Thou and all the saints Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth House in the shade of comfortable roofs, Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls, I, 'twixt the spring and downfal of the light Bow down one thousand and two hundred times To Christ, the Virgin Mother and the Saints: Or in the night, after a little sleep, I wake, the chill stars sparkle; I am wet With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost, I wear an undressed goatskin on my neck, And in my weak, lean arms I lift the Cross, And strive and wrestle with Thee till I die. O mercy, mercy, wash away my sin!"

A mournful spectacle. Devotion excited to madness, while mind, heart, and conscience, all are dumb, and the poor weak body only bears the heavy burdens which the tyrannous soul heaps upon it!

Devotion, then, needs _conscience_. Conscience tells a man that he must act as well as pray. Devotion makes the great act of prayer. Conscience works out into the actual of every-day life, the ideal of which devotion has conceived. Will then devotion and conscience be sufficient for a noble manhood? Devotion and conscience alone developed, have ofttimes, in the days that are past, formed some stern old grand inquisitor, torturing the life out of human sinews because he ought. The grand inquisitor's devotion and conscience told him that he ought to advance the holy faith by every engine in his power, and therefore, as he considered that the rack, the thumbscrews, the rope, the fire and the faggot were the best possible engines, he used the same to the utmost of his ability; and thought, alas for humanity! that he was doing God service.

The grand inquisitor had devotion, he had conscience, he probably also had nerves of iron; but he could not possibly have had a _heart_. Devotion, then, and conscience need a loving, human heart. Will these three be sufficient? The picture grows fairer, we begin to feel less pain when we turn away from the stern, dark portrait of the grand inquisitor, which frowns so grimly in the picture gallery of history, and look upon that fair and gentle upturned face, half shaded by the veil that covers her head. That is a nun of the order of Saint Theresa.

The pale, emaciated countenance tells of many a vigil protracted through the long hours of the night; those wild eyes once saw, or thought they saw, the picture of the Virgin hanging in her cell smiling on her as she prayed; yea, and have wept many a tear as she repeated her sins over to her confessor, or as she stood by the bed-side of some poor sufferer, while those gentle Christian hands smoothed the dying pillow. Rest in peace, soul sainted and dear! The tears thou didst once shed, are wiped away now forever; the sins thou didst once bewail, are all forgiven now, for thou hast loved much!

But the day of nuns has gone forever. A higher development must be sought for. The nun becomes impossible when we train the _intellect_; Devotion says, Worship; the Mind adds, The Lord thy God. The Conscience says, Do right; the Intellect shows what is right. The Heart says, Love thy fellow-men; the Intellect tells the right way of loving them. Piety and charity! these are glorious! these are the two angels from Heaven which prompt us to help our brothers who need our help; but intellect must show us the way to do it. To take a single instance. Piety and charity cannot show us how to drain and ventilate and rebuild the hovels of the poor in New York. No, every spade, every saw, every hammer employed in that most righteous undertaking must be directed by intellect, by science. Piety and charity may prompt, but intellect must guide.

I know full well that many a woman's heart, guided only by her sacred instinct of loving, acts out the law of right without any conscious questioning of the intellect; that a thousand tender feet carry the gospel of Christ along the alleys of New York and London, or along the corridors of the Crimean hospital, though even there also woman's wit has to aid woman's heart. The noble heart, the Christian love of Florence Nightingale took her to those eastern shores; this made the voice tender and the hand gentle. But whoso reads the account of what she did, will see that beside these, wit and wisdom, keen discerning of means to ends, ability to see what ought to be done, intellect, reason in short, was necessary in order to make a Florence Nightingale possible, together with an exhaustless fund of bodily endurance, fortitude and stoicism.

Thus, then, we find that devotion, conscience, heart, and intellect are all necessary to each other in the harmonious development of Human Nature. Will they be found sufficient for a perfect life?

Put together a strong soul, a tender conscience, a woman's heart, and a man's intellect, and we have a Charlotte Bronté,--surely one of the best types of the modern mind. Will she find these four noble parts of Human Nature sufficient for the task of living?

Let Charlotte Bronté answer, walking painfully across the moor with hand held hard to beating side, sitting now and then upon a stone to keep herself from falling, wondering why the daylight blinds her so, obliged to give up Villette owing to the terrible headaches which it brings on. Let Charlotte Bronté answer, dying before her time at thirty-nine years of age, when the path of fame was just beginning to be bright before her, and the world was just beginning to know how much it wanted her. Charlotte Bronté, the gifted and the feeble, the lynx-eyed and the blind, so full of glorious strength and pitiable weakness! Charlotte Bronté, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard as a giant's grasp upon her throat! Charlotte Bronté cannot tell why she is so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,--why earth, our beautiful earth, is like a charnel house to her. And yet we think that the most ordinary passerby could see very satisfactory reasons why Charlotte Bronté was what she was, and felt what she felt. Hollow cheek and faded eye, teach their wisdom to their possessor last of all. The pale-eyed school-girl, who never played along with the other children, never ran and laughed and shouted with the rest, little knew what days and hours and years of dulness, of pain and agony, she was laying up for the future, what a premature grave she was digging for herself. Peace be with her, her toil is over; it is now three years since Heaven received in Charlotte Bronté one angel more.

Intellect, then, needs _body_. Come, then, and see me build a Man! A calm, silent devotion, a conscience pure and reverent, a heart manful and true, an intellect clear and keen, a frame of iron,--with these will we dower our hero, and call him Washington!

From me Washington needs no eulogy. Free America is at once his eulogy and his monument! It is useless to say more. Every one here feels in his heart a higher praise than can be uttered by the tongue. But let me ask you, What would Washington's qualities of mind and heart have availed his country, unless the manly strength, the frame of iron had been added? A good man he might have been, a patriot he surely would have been; but the Father of his Country, never! The soul that trusted in God, the conscience that felt the omnipotence of justice and right, the heart that beat for his country's weal alone, the mind that thought out her freedom, was upborne by the body that knew no fatigue, by the nerves that knew not how to tremble.

Washington had to endure physical fatigue enough to have killed three ordinary men. And how well did his youth prepare him for a life of protracted toil. Hear his biographer Irving. "He was a self-disciplinarian in physical as well as mental matters, and practised himself in all kinds of athletic exercises, such as running, leaping, pitching quoits, and tossing bars. His frame even in infancy had been large and powerful, and he now excelled most of his playmates in contests of agility and strength. As a proof of his muscular power, a place is still pointed out at Fredericksburg, near the lower ferry, where, when a boy, he threw a stone across the river. In horsemanship, too, he already excelled, and was ready to back, and able to manage, the most fiery steed. Traditional anecdotes still remain of his achievements in this respect."

Some of you have doubtless seen in Thackeray's 'Virginians,' that young Warrington found that he was more than a match for the English jumpers, as indeed, writes he, he ought to be, as he could jump twenty-one feet and a half, and no one in Virginia could beat him, except Colonel G. Washington.

It is needless to say that I do not mean to exalt the body at the expense of the higher faculties. I only maintain that the rest are incomplete without the physical element; in which indeed all the other powers dwell, and by means of which they are more or less clearly manifested. There may, of course, be vast physical energy without any corresponding development of mind or soul, as any blacksmith or prize fighter could tell us. And further, there may be a character, in which some of the higher qualities may exist in great perfection, coupled, too, with mighty force of body, and yet the character may be incomplete. Take, as an instance, another of America's great men.

Daniel Webster! perhaps the most cavernous head, set upon the strongest shoulders, which has appeared upon the planet, since the soul of Socrates went back to God. Daniel Webster! strong mind in strong body, leader and king of men, deep-chested, lion-voiced, whose words of power moved men as the wind moves the sea, whose eloquence had a physical energy, a bodily grandeur about it like to that of no other man. Daniel Webster! pride of all Americans; to you I leave it to say where he was weak. It belongs not to me, a stranger, to pluck one laurel from that stately brow; his own brethren must do it, with reluctant and half remorseful hands, pitying the errors which marred so grand a character, but saying of him as I would say of England, Webster, with all thy faults, I love thee still.

Our analysis of human character, necessarily one-sided and imperfect, is now ended. It remains for us to ask, What are its bearings upon American education? How far does American education fulfil the wants of Human Nature, and wherein does it disregard them? The title of my Lecture tells plainly enough, where I think that the great deficiency is found; a deficiency which reacts upon both mind and morals, and ofttimes utterly defeats the best efforts of clergymen and teachers. I assert, then, that, in America, the body is almost entirely neglected. Thirty thousand clergymen, from as many pulpits, advocate the claims of the conscience and the soul. A hundred thousand teachers are busied throughout the length and breadth of the land in training the intellect, while a man could almost count on his fingers the number of those engaged in training the body. The intellectual training which the masses receive, is the highest glory of American education. If I wanted a stranger to believe that the Millennium was not far off, I would take him to some of those grand Ward Schools in New York, where able heads are trained by the thousand. When I myself entered them, I was literally astonished. When I looked at the teachers who instructed that throng of young souls, I could not help saying to myself, Ah! dear friends, it would do you good to know what I feel just now. I can feel the very blessing of God descending on your labors, just as if I could see it with mine eyes. What piety have been at work here, in the construction of this colossal system of education! What inspired energy was needed to work it out! What charity is necessary to carry it on! Many a teacher saw I there, unknown, may-be, to all the world, carrying on her work with noble zeal and earnestness, to whom the quick young brains around bore abundant testimony. When I saw them, I blessed them in my heart, I magnified mine office, and said to myself, I, too, am a teacher.

I spent four or five days doing little else than going through these truly wonderful schools. I stayed more than three hours in one of them, wondering at all I saw, admiring the stately order, the unbroken discipline of the whole arrangements, and the wonderful quickness and intelligence of the scholars. That same evening I went to see a friend, whose daughter, a child of thirteen, was at one of the ward schools. I examined her in algebra, and found that the little girl of thirteen could hold her own with many of a larger growth. Did she go to school to-day? asked I. No, was the answer, she has not been for some time, as she was beginning to get quite a serious curvature of the spine, so now she goes regularly to a gymnastic doctor. I almost feel ashamed to criticize such noble institutions as the schools of New York; but truth compels me to do this. Hitherto, nothing whatever has been done to train the bodies of the tens of thousands who are educated there. All that is done is excellent, is wonderful, but fearful drawbacks come into play, in the shape of physical weakness, and positive male-formation of body.

The only remedy which can be devised, I think, in a crowded city like New York, where it is impossible to get open ground, is to have large gymnasiums attached to every ward school, and daily exercise therein should form an essential part of the education there. The importance of this to New York cannot be estimated, and I heard with joy, that a gymnasium was established in at least one of the ward schools, and I found out that the teachers of others were alive to this most crying need. I read too, with very great pleasure, that a Mr. Sedgwick of New York was appointed to deliver a lecture on the importance of physical education, at the next meeting of the Teachers Association, in that State; and indeed every one begins to feel that something must be done, and that quickly. Miss Beecher's book enlightened most people on this subject, and reform is already inaugurated. It is well that it is so, or the race would dwindle away before our very eyes. Listen to some serio-comic verse upon this subject, taken out of your Lecturer's portfolio. It is an address to America, dictated by an ancient sage:--

'Oh! latest born of time, the wise man said, A mighty destiny surrounds thy head; Great is thy mission, but the puny son Lacks strength to finish what the sires begun; Thy hapless daughters breathe the poison'd air, Fair they may be, but fragile more than fair; They know not, doom'd ones, that the air of heaven, For breathing purposes to man was given; They know not half the things which life requires, But melt their lives away where stoves and fires, And furnace issuing from the realms beneath, Distils through parlor floors its poisonous breath. Sooner or later must the slighted air And exercise take vengeance on the fair. Ah! one by one I see them fade and fall, Both old and young, fair, dark or short or tall, Till one stupendous ruin wraps them all.'

One can sometimes, in a smiling way, give utterance to truths which seem hard and stern when spoken in grim earnest. Let us see whether we cannot find some allegory to represent what we mean.

Some time ago, I read a tale which related that a certain gentleman was, once on a time, digging a deep hole in his garden. He had, as I myself had in my younger days, a perfect passion for digging holes, for the mere pleasure of doing it; but the hole which he was now digging was by far the deepest which he had ever attempted. At last he became perfectly fascinated, carried away by his pursuit, and actually had his dinner let down to him by a bucket. Well, he dug on late and early, when just as he was plunging in his spade with great energy for a new dig, he penetrated right through, and fell down, down to the centre of the earth.