Emerson College - Emersonian Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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PHYSICAL CULTURE. PHYSIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS TO BE OBEYED IN BODILY EDUCATION. H Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost . . therefore glorify God in your body. -I. COR. vi., 19-20. NE of the encouraging signs of these times is that people are coming to recognize that there is no virtue in being sick. The time has been when life was considered unholy, but Vitality is as precious in the sight of God as is intelligence. Soundness of brain depends upon soundness of body. There is no such thing as a sound mind in an unsound body. The unsoundness of mind may not be Very apparent, but it is actual. xgThe test of the health of the body is happy sensation continuous. tgy, y lVe are responsible to God for our bodies. The appearance of men and Women as We see them on the street, in the counting-room, and in the parlor, as Well as the testimony brought in from every source

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couraged the author to yield to the requests of students and alumni that the thoughts suggested in the lectures he placed in a more permanent form. The Writer has striven to present the system in a teachable form, to avoid technical phraseology so far as may he, and, at the same time, to present a Work which shall he suggestive rather than exhaustive. The exercises herein described and illustrated, con- stituting the original system of physical culture of the Emerson College of Oratory, are now being taught by graduates of this institution in universities, colleges, state normal and high schools in all Darts of the J. United States and in Canada. C.W'.E.

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in regard to public schools, and the time allowed for physical exercises therein, are sufficient to show us that, as a nation, we have little conception of what physical education requires. It is astonishing, in view of the past, and in view of the future, that inen do not see that, in a republican government, we must depend upon the strength and the power of the inen and the women who carry it forward,-- that nothing is attained without the rounding of the whole nian. I scarcely need refer to the Greeks, and yet, so far as education is concerned, they have been the despair of all suc- ceeding ages. YV e have had in no other age schools to be compared in results with the Greek schools. Nowhere else has there been such personal education. Wliat did they lay as the basis '? Physical culture. ln that is the secret of their success. Greece has given us representative inen in every department. VVe point to Greece for the greatest orator, for the greatest creative poet, for the greatest sculptor, for the first nian in what we consider the highest mental philosophy. Plato intellectually stands at the head of all the philosophers of the world. We inust reineinber, then, that that which made the Greeks what they were about four or five hundred years before Christ, was the natural evolution from physical culture. For nearly two thousand years the subject of 0 A o ,