I.

THE GUIDANCE OF THE BODY





THE literature relating to the care of the human body is already
very extensive. Much has been written about the body's proper food,
the air it should breathe, the clothing by which it should be
protected, the best methods of its development. That literature
needs but little added to it, until we, as rational beings, come
nearer to obeying the laws which it discloses, and to feeling daily
the help which comes from that obedience.

It is of the better use, the truer guidance of this machine, that I
wish especially to write. Although attention is constantly called to
the fact of its misuse,--as in neglected rest and in
over-strain,--in all the unlimited variety which the perverted
ingenuity of a clever people has devised, it seems never to have
come to any one's mind that this strain in all things, small and
great, is something that can be and should be studiously abandoned,
with as regular a process of training, from the first simple steps
to those more complex, as is required in the work for the
development of muscular strength. When a perversion of Nature's laws
has continued from generation to generation, we, of the ninth or
tenth generation, can by no possibility jump back into the place