Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene | Page 5

to urge that man is what he does or that he is the sum of
his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that character is simply muscle
habits, with Maudsley; that the age of art is now slowly superseding the
age of science, and that the artist will drive out with the professor, with
the anonymous author of "Rembrandt als Erzicher";[1] that history is
consciously willed movements, with Bluntschli; or that we could form
no conception of force or energy in the world but for our own muscular
effort; to hold that most thought involves change of muscle tension as
more or less integral to it--all this shows how we have modified the
antique Ciceronian conception vivere est cogitari, [To live is to think]
to vivere est velle, [To live is to will] and gives us a new sense of the
importance of muscular development and regimen.[2]
Modern psychology thus sees in muscles organs of expression for all
efferent processes. Beyond all their demonstrable functions, every
change of attention and of psychic states generally plays upon them
unconsciously, modifying their tension in subtle ways so that they may
be called organs of thought and feeling as well as of will, in which
some now see the true Kantian thing-in-itself the real substance of the
world, in the anthropomorphism of force. Habits even determine the
deeper strata of belief; thought is repressed action; and deeds, not
words, are the language of complete men. The motor areas are closely

related and largely identical with the psychic, and muscle culture
develops brain-centers as nothing else yet demonstrably does. Muscles
are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and
even of manners and customs. For the young, motor education is
cardinal, and is now coming to due recognition; and, for all, education
is incomplete without a motor side. Skill, endurance, and perseverance
may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity, caprice,
ennui, restlessness, lack of control and poise, muscular faults.
To understand the momentous changes of motor functions that
characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable
aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all
normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the
progress from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the
muscles and movements of the trunk and large joints, neck, back, hips,
shoulders, knees, and elbows, sometimes called central, and which in
general man has in common with the higher and larger animals. Their
activities are few, mostly simultaneous, alternating and rhythmic, as of
the legs in walking, and predominate in hard-working men and women
with little culture or intelligence, and often in idiots. The latter or
accessory movements are those of the hand, tongue, face, and
articulatory organs, and these may be connected into a long and greatly
diversified series, as those used in writing, talking, piano-playing. They
are represented by smaller and more numerous muscles, whose
functions develop later in life and represent a higher standpoint of
evolution. These smaller muscles for finer movements come into
function later and are chiefly associated with psychic activity, which
plays upon them by incessantly changing their tensions, if not causing
actual movement. It is these that are so liable to disorder in the many
automatisms and choreic tics we see in school children, especially if
excited or fatigued. General paralysis usually begins in the higher
levels by breaking these down, so that the first symptom of its insidious
and never interrupted progress is inability to execute the more exact
and delicate movements of tongue or hand, or both. Starting with the
latest evolutionary level, it is a devolution that may work downward till
very many of the fundamental activities are lost before death.

Nothing better illustrates this distinction than the difference between
the fore foot of animals and the human hand. The first begins as a fin or
paddle or is armed with a hoof, and is used solely for locomotion.
Some carnivora with claws use the fore limb also for holding well as
tearing, and others for digging. Arboreal life seems to have almost
created the simian hand and to have wrought a revolution in the form
and use of the forearm and its accessory organs, the fingers. Apes and
other tree-climbing creatures must not only adjust their prehensile
organ to a wide variety of distances and sizes of branches, but must use
the hands more or less freely for picking, transporting, and eating fruit;
and this has probably been a prime factor in lifting man to the erect
position, without which human intelligence as we know it could have
hardly been possible. "When we attempt to measure the gap between
man and the lower animals in terms of the form of movement, the
wonder is no less great than when we use the term of