A Sound Mind in a Sound Body : Part 2

How to Get on in the World: A Ladder to Practical Success
by Major A.R. Calhoon

(Page 23 of 28)

The use of early labor in self-imposed mechanical employments may be illustrated by the boyhood of Sir Isaac Newton. Though comparatively a dull scholar, he was very assiduous in the use of his saw, hammer, and hatchet - "knocking and hammering in his lodging room" - making models of windmills, carriages, and machines of all sorts; and as he grew older, he took delight in making little tables and cupboards for his friends. Smeaton, Watt, and Stephenson were equally handy with tools when mere boys; and but for such kind of self-culture in their youth it is doubtful whether they would have accomplished so much in their manhood.

Such was also the early training of the great inventors and mechanics described in the preceding pages, whose contrivance and intelligence were practically trained by the constant use of their hands in early life. Even where men belonging to the manual labor class have risen above it, and become more purely intellectual laborers, they have found the advantages of their early training in their later pursuits. Elihu Burritt says he found hard labor necessary to enable him to study with effect; and more than once he gave up school teaching and study, and taking to his leather apron again, went back to his blacksmith's forge and anvil for the health of his body and mind's sake.

The training of young men in the use of tools would at the same time that it educated them in "common things," teach them the use of their hands and arms, familiarize them with healthy work, exercise their faculties upon things tangible and actual, give them some practical acquaintance with mechanics, impart to them the ability of being useful, and implant in them the habit of persevering physical effort. This is an advantage which the working classes, strictly so called, certainly possess over the leisure classes - that they are in early life under the necessity of applying themselves laboriously to some mechanical pursuit or other - thus acquiring manual dexterity, and the use of their physical powers.

The chief disadvantage attached to the calling of the laborious classes is, not that they are employed in physical work, but that they are too exclusively so employed, often to the neglect of their moral and intellectual faculties. While the youths of the leisure classes, having been taught to associate labor with servility, have shunned it, and been allowed to grow up practically ignorant, the poorer classes, confining themselves within the circle of their laborious callings, have been allowed to grow up, in a large proportion of cases, absolutely illiterate. It seems, possible, however, to avoid both these evils by combining physical training or physical work with intellectual culture; and there are various signs abroad which seem to mark the gradual adoption of this healthier system of education.

The success of even professional men depends in no slight degree on their physical health; and a public writer has gone so far as to say that "the greatness of our great men is quite as much a bodily affair as a mental one." A healthy breathing apparatus is as indispensable to the successful lawyer or politician as a well-cultured intellect. The thorough aeration of his blood by free exposure to a large breathing surface in the lungs is necessary to maintain that vital power on which the vigorous working of the brain in so large a measure depends.

The lawyer has to climb the heights of his profession through close and heated courts, and the political leader has to bear the fatigue and excitement of long and anxious debates in a crowded House. Hence the lawyer in full practice and the parliamentary leader in full work are called upon to display powers of physical endurance and activity even more extraordinary than those of the intellect - such powers as have been exhibited in so remarkable a degree by Brougham, Lyndhurst and Campbell; by Peel, Graham and Palmerston - all full-chested men.

Though Sir Walter Scott, when at Edinburgh College, went by the name of "The Greek Blockhead," he was, notwithstanding his lameness, a remarkably healthy youth; he could spear a salmon with the best fisher on the Tweed, and ride a wild horse with any hunter in Yarrow. When devoting himself in after life to literary pursuits, Sir Walter never lost his taste for field sports, but while writing "Waverley" in the morning he would in the afternoon course hares. Professor Wilson was a very athlete, as great at throwing the hammer as in his flights of eloquence and poetry; and Burns, when a youth, was remarkable chiefly for his leaping, putting, and wrestling.

Some of the greatest divines were distinguished in their youth for their physical energies. Isaac Barrow, when at the Charterhouse School, was notorious for his pugilistic encounters, in which he got many a bloody nose; Andrew Fuller, when working as a farmer's lad at Soham, was chiefly famous for his skill in boxing; and Adam Clarke, when a boy, was only remarkable for the strength displayed by him in "rolling large stones about" - the secret, possibly, of some of the power which he subsequently displayed in rolling forth large thoughts in his manhood.

While it is necessary, then, in the first place to secure this solid foundation of physical health, it must also be observed that the cultivation of the habit of mental application is quite indispensable for the education of the student. The maxim that "labor conquers all things" holds especially true in the case of the conquest of knowledge. The road into learning is alike free to all who will give the labor and the study requisite to gather it; nor are there any difficulties so great that the student of resolute purpose may not surmount and overcome them. It was one of the characteristic expressions of Chatterton, that God had sent his creatures into the world with arms long enough to reach anything if they chose to be at the trouble. In study, as in business, energy is the great thing.

There must be "fervet opus;" we must not only strike the iron while it is hot, but strike it till it is made hot. It is astonishing how much may be accomplished in self-culture by the energetic and the persevering, who are careful to avail themselves of opportunities, and use up the fragments of spare time which the idle permit to run to waste. Therefore Ferguson learned astronomy from the heavens while wrapped in a sheepskin on the highland hills. Therefore Stone learned mathematics while working as a journeyman gardener; therefore Drew studied the highest philosophy in the intervals of cobbling shoes; and therefore Miller taught himself geology while working as a day laborer in a quarry.

Published by the Christian Herald, Louis Klopsch, Proprietor, Bible House, New York.
Copyright 1895 by Louis Klopsch.