THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 643 



know why they died. It was because tlie spirit was already dead. 

 And who has not heard it said that Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown or Mr. 

 Jones is kept alive by his business? In view of what men might be 

 interested in, it seems to me a very poor and bare and altogether a 

 pitiable thing to be kept alive on. 



Manual training is still too new to have seen its generations of 

 schoolboys grow gray-haired, and it may easily turn out that when 

 gray hairs do come, the disintegrating forces will have done their 

 perfect work, and the boys now so full of promise will be found 

 among the sad company that I have been picturing. As Thoreau 

 says, we begin to gather the materials for a palace, and end by build- 

 ing a hut. But I do know that at least they start out in life warm and 

 eager, that they are aglow with interest and vitality, and that they 

 find life very full and rich. 



The session of the manual training school ends between two 

 and three. In those schools where that spirit of the complete life 

 most prevails, where that spirit of radiancy is dominant, you will 

 find boys and masters still at work at four, at five, and even at 

 -six o'clock. And it is not uncommon for it to be necessary to 

 make a rule when the boys must leave the building, in order to 

 give the women a chance to make things clean and tidy for the next 

 day. In the morning the boys begin coming at eight; they would 

 come earlier if they were allowed. This voluntary devotion to the 

 school is not to me without a deep significance. It shows that boys 

 are happy at their work, that they are alive and interested. It indi- 

 cates a measure of self-realization. 



The increase of health which comes from the bodily exercise, and 

 particularly the increase of muscular power that the manual work 

 engenders — I mean muscular power not in an athletic sense so much 

 as in a general organic sense — make the organism finer and better 

 adapted to the work of the spirit, if I may use this dualistic phrase- 

 ology without misleading any one. We can not make bricks without 

 straw, and we can not build up emotional and intellectual power in 

 the air. Like the energy which is the subject-matter of physics, this 

 power is always associated with matter, may indeed be called the 

 spiritual energy in matter, but with matter of a certain quality, 

 highly organized, sensitive, sound. Dr. Johnson said that sick men 

 were rascals, and I believe that he was more than half right. This 

 statement will at once call to mind a goodly company of men and 

 women, world heroes in fact, who were half invalids or wholly 

 invalids, and who yet accomplished marvels in art, in science, and 

 in humanity. But in no case can it be shown that this invalidism 

 was in the brain tissue. The malady was of some special organ, and 

 was perhaps a mortal malady, and yet for a time the brain centers 



