HEALTH AND RECREATION. 785 



At the same time I do not say this in order to divert attention from 

 what may be rightly called the natural animal instincts of man. I 

 have no doubt there might be a cultivation of mind which should cease 

 to be recreative, and which thereby should be as injurious to the health 

 of the body as an over-cultivation of mere gross mechanical labor, and 

 which might even be more dangerous. It is not a little interesting to 

 observe that the greatest of the Greeks had become conscious of this 

 very danger, as if. be had learned its existence from observations in his 

 daily life. Plato, in treating of this subject in one of his admirable 

 discourses, warns us against the delusion that the cultivation of nothing 

 but what is intellectually the best is, of necessity, always the best. It 

 is more just, he says, to take account of good things than of evil. 

 Everything good is beautiful ; yet the beautiful is not without measure. 

 . An animal destined to be beautiful must possess symmetry. Of sym- 

 metries we understand those which are small, but are ignorant of the 

 greatest. And, indeed, no symmetry is of more importance with re- 

 spect to health and disease, virtue and vice, than that of the soul 

 toward the body. When a weaker and inferior form is the vehicle of 

 a strong and in every way mighty soul, or the contrary ; and when 

 these, soul and body, enter into compact union, then the animal is not 

 wholly beautiful, for it is without symmetry. , Just as a body which has 

 immoderately long legs, or any other superfluity of parts that hinder 

 its symmetry, becomes base, in the participation of labor suffers many 

 afflictions, and, though suffering an aggregation of accidents, becomes 

 the cause to itself of many ills, so the compound essence — of body and 

 soul — which we call the animal, when the soul is stronger than the body 

 and prevails over it — then the soul, agitating the whole body, charges it 

 with diseases, and by ardent pursuit causes it to waste away. On the 

 contrary, wdien a body that is large or superior to the soul is joined with 

 a small and weak intellect, the motions of the more powerful, prevail- 

 ing and enlarging what is their own, but making the reflective part of 

 the soul deaf, indocile, and oblivious, it induces the greatest of all 

 diseases, ignorance. As a practical corollary to these remarks, Plato 

 adds that there is one safety for both the conditions he has specified : 

 neither to move the soul without the body, nor the body without the 

 soul. The mathematician, therefore, or any one else who ardently de- 

 votes himself to any intellectual pursuit, should at the same time en- 

 gage the body in gymnastic exercises ; while the man who is careful in 

 forming the body should at the same time unite the motions of the 

 soul, in the exercise of music and philosophy, if he intends to be one 

 who may justly be called beautiffil and at the same time "right good." 



Such is the Platonic reading of the recreative life as it appeared 

 to him in his day and among his marvelous people. We have but to 

 trouble ourselves with half the problem he refers to, and with but half 

 the advice that he suggests. Little fear, I think, is there among us 

 that the soul should be so much stronger than the body, and so greatly 



