Comfort and Exercise; An Essay Toward Normal Conduct (Paperback)

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: Ill COMFORT IN EDUCATION IP we may say that comfortable living depends upon the right adjustment between ourselves and our circumstances, if such harmonious relation is the fundamental condition in which happiness largely resides, then certainly our training for life may very well have for its ideal a normal growth, so balanced as to result in the most perfect personal poise, so directed as to result in the most perfect efficiency. The true end of culture is not reached when it has given us merely a healthy body well nurtured and developed, or a sound mind broadened and enriched with various learning, or a glad, well- intentioned spirit. Its object is only attained when it has so correlated all these forces as to produce in them the habit of perfect and prompt co-ordination. Nothing short of this balance of development can secure for us poise of character and a happy adjustment to life, or result in anything but discomfort, mal-development, and limited efficiency. Perfection of culture can never be reached through intellectual acquirement alone, through spiritual achievement alone, any more than it can through physical training alone. It cannot be reached by any two of these ways, nor even by a haphazard pursuit in all three directions. It must be attained through harmonious adjustment of all three forces; allowing them to interplay and react naturally, freely, and fully according to their normal interdependence; each one cultivated with regard to the others, and the culture of each rounded and refined in turn by the culture of the rest. Furthermore, this difficult task can never be achieved by the acquisition of knowledge, the acquisition of insight, the acquisition of strengthalone, but only when the character which has acquired them is happily occupied in mak...