The Vitalized School | Page 2

that some people have more life in threescore and ten
years than Methuselah had in his more than nine hundred years.
=Life measured by intensity.=--This statement is not demonstrable, of
course, but it serves to make evident the fact that some people have
more of life in a given time than others in the same time. In this sense,
life may be measured by the number of reactions to objectives. These
reactions may be increased by training. Two persons, in passing a
shop-window, may not see the same objects; or one may see twice as
many as the other, according to their ability to react. The man who was

locked in a vault at the cemetery by accident, and was not discovered
for an hour, thought he had spent four days in his imprisonment. He
had really lived four days in a single hour by reason of the intensity of
life during that hour.
=Illustrations.=--In the case of dreams, we are told that years may be
condensed into minutes, or even seconds, by reason of the rapidity of
reactions. The rapidity and intensity of these reactions make themselves
manifest on the face of the dreamer. Beads of perspiration and facial
contortions betoken intensity of feeling. In such an experience life is
intense. If a mental or spiritual cyclometer could be used in such a case,
it would make a high record of speed. Life sometimes touches bottom,
and sometimes scales the heights. But the distance between these
extremes varies greatly in different persons. The life of one may have
but a single octave; of the other, eight, or a hundred, or a thousand. The
life of Job is an apt illustration. No one has been able to sound the
depths of his suffering, nor has any one been able to measure the
heights of his exaltation. We may not readily compute the octaves in
such a life as his.
=The complexity of life.=--It is not easy to think life, much less define
it. The elements are so numerous as to baffle and bewilder the mind. It
looks out at one from so many corners that it seems Argus-eyed. At one
moment we see it on the Stock Exchange where men struggle and strive
in a mad frenzy of competition; at another, in a quiet home, where a
mother soothes her baby to sleep, where there is no competition but,
rather, a sublime monopoly. Again, it manifests itself in the clanking of
machinery where men are tunneling the mountain or constructing a
canal to unite oceans; or, again, in the laboratory where the microscope
is revealing the form of the snow crystal. One man is watching the
movements of the heavenly bodies as they file by his telescope, while
another writes a proclamation that makes free a race of people. Another
man is leading an army into battle, while some Doctor MacClure is
breasting the storm in the darkness as he goes forth on his mission of
mercy.
=Manifestations of life.=--These manifestations of life men call trade,

commerce, history, mathematics, science, nature, and philanthropy.
And men write these words in books, and other men write other books
trying to explain their meaning. Then, still others divide and subdivide,
and science becomes the sciences, and mathematics becomes arithmetic,
and algebra, and geometry, and trigonometry, and calculus, and
astronomy. Here mathematics and science seem to merge. And, in time,
history and geography come together, and sometimes strive for
precedence.
Thus, books accumulate into libraries and so add another to the many
elements of life. Then magazines are written to explain the books and
their authors. The motive behind the book is analyzed in an effort to
discover the workings of the author's mind and heart. In these
revelations we sometimes hear the rippling of the brook, and
sometimes the moan of the sea; sometimes the cooing of the dove, and
sometimes the scream of the eagle; sometimes the bleating of the lamb,
and sometimes the roaring of the lion. In them we see the moonbeams
that play among the flowers and the lightning that rends the forest; the
blossoms that filter from the trees and the avalanche that carries
destruction; the rain that fructifies the earth and the hurricane that
destroys.
=Life in literature.=--Back of these sights and sounds we discover
men--Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante.
We trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature.
And in literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life.
Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They
saw and felt life to be large and so wrote it down large; and because
they wrote it thus, what they wrote endures. They stood upon the
heights and saw the struggles of man with himself, with other men, and
with