The Foundations of Success Author:Stanley De Brath Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter II PHYSICAL EDUCATION " To be weak is to be miserable, doing or suffering."—Milton. 1. We all desire, for ourselves and for our children, the maxi... more »mum of power. Power of muscle, to the end of distinction in sports, in athletics, in the hunting field; power for our daily work, for the endurance of fatigue, and for resistance to the influences which assail us, such as infective germs and other forces tending to break down some healthy structure or to drain our vital energies : all these are felt to be the first necessities of happiness. In a word, we desire a perfect development of body and that perfectly balanced interaction of function which constitutes health. Scarcely less do we wish for power of understanding. It is a peculiar and somewhat amusing fact that human beings cannot let things alone. We call it the prerogative of " Homo Sapiens " to account for all sorts of things which do not obviously concern him, and laughable as our pretensions often may be, it cannot be denied that this instinct for analysis is essential to human progress. If the cobbler thought of nothing but his last, and we all kept our interest solely for our functions in the social hive, human intercourse would be at the level which we may observe among the ants and the bees ; and estimable as are these little insects, their functions would be somewhat limited as a human ideal ! Understanding—that mental grasp whichenables a man to judge correctly of the nature and properties of the agents in play around him—is a form of power as essential as physical health to his prosperity and success. More highly still is rated that form of nervous power which is called skill. Every action in which physical material is dealt with depends on the play of two sets of nervous functions, the sensory and the ...« less