A  August  ^92airm  \       The  Significance  of  Education.  525 
with  the  following  sentence :  "A  sound  mind,  in  a  sound  body,  con- 
stitutes the  principal  happiness,  and  perfection  of  man;  the  means, 
therefore,  by  which  such  great  and  essential  benefits  are  to  be  se- 
cured, haA^e  ever  been  the  object  of  his  solicitude,  and  most  anxious 
inquiry."  The  statement,  made  a  hundred  years  ago,  was  not  new, 
nor  was  it  in  its  main  thought  original.  It  is  in  reality  but  a  para- 
phrase of  what  the  Latin  poet,  Juvenal,  said  eighteen  hundred  years 
before  him  in  that  often  quoted  Latin  phrase :  "Mens  sana  in  corpore 
sano,"  as  constituting  the  ideal  possession  of  a  Roman  youth. 
The  statement  has  appealed  to  me  for  the  universality  of  its 
application.  It  would  be  quite  impossible  at  the  present  time,  or  it 
will  be  impossible  through  the  long  years  of  history  yet  to  come,  to 
formulate  the  matter,  either  in  its  Original  epigrammatic  form 
eighteen  centuries  ago,  or  in  its  paraphrase  a  century  ago,  as  the 
essential  fact  in  the  existence  of  the  individual,  both  for  himself  and 
for  the  part  that-  he  perforce  must  play  in  the  social  complex  of  his 
day  and  generation — for  I  take  it  as  a  self-evident  truth  that  no  man 
stands  for  himself  alone  in  his  out-goings  and  his  in-comings,  in  his 
opinions  and  his  prejudices,  in  his  joys  and  his  sorrows,  in  the  mani- 
fold actions  and  reactions  of  human  contact  in  the  relationships  of 
life,  and  that  his  mind  and  his  body  in  their  balance  are  a  funda- 
mental fact  in  the  greater  balance  of  the  world  of  men  beyond  him. 
If  this  fact  then  remains,  as  it  seems  to  me  to  remain  almost  an 
eternal  verity,  that  a  "sound  body"  is  an  essential  factor,  and  let  us 
even  say  the  essential  factor  of  successful  living,  it  is,  after  all,  but 
a  general  statement  that  like  such  statements  elsewhere  is  in  need  of 
what  is  sometimes  called  a  definition  of  particulars  to  make  it  di- 
rectly intelligible  and  applicable  to  any  particular  time.  In  point  of 
fact,  it  has  had  at  one  time  a  meaning  very  different  from  what  it 
has  had  at  another,  and  while  in  a  broad  sense  it  has  been  always 
true,  in  a  narrow  sense  of  the  actual  accomplishment  of  result  in  the 
light  of  the  understanding  of  a  particular  time,  it  has  swayed  back- 
ward and  forward  as  the  ideas  of  life  and  living  have  advanced  or 
retreated  on  the  long  highway  of  human  history.  What  I  mean  to 
say  is  that  while  the  attainment  of  a  sound  mind  in  a  sound  body 
has  been  the  educational  ideal  of  the  centuries — for  it  is  a  true  defini- 
tion of  the  purpose  of  education,  as  it  has  ever  been — the  means  to 
attain  it  and  the  real  results  that  it  has  been  desired  to  attain  have 
been  as  different  as  has  been  the  whole  varying  course  of  human 
civilization.    The  serious  ideals  of  one  age  have  been  at  times  the 
