Full text: Proceedings of the International Congress of Education of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July 25-28, 1893

140 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
could be abated or prevented if our educational authorities would only 
learn to recognize and apply those principles of physical training which 
underlie and determine the formation of correct and natural habits of 
speech. Deferring for the present the closer study of those principles, 
and the proper mode of carrying them into effect in the special field 
under consideration, let ns note some of the more salient facts regarding 
she nature of the human body, and the general laws of bodily training. 
Broadly speaking, the body is a complicated living machine for doing 
work. Its work is to transform potential energy into active energy. It 
derives its store of potential energy from the oxygen and food-stuffs fur- 
nished by the blood. Since the body is a self-building, self-sustaining 
mechanism, only a portion of the active energy set free by the metabolism 
of its tissues is available for external and internal mechanical work. A 
large amount of motor and molecular motion is expended in renewing 
and enlarging the tissues of the body, in maintaining its animal heat, and 
in effecting the various chemical changes incident to blood-making and 
olood-cleansing.. In other words, the active energy expended in thinking, 
willing, and doing is derived from the fund of energy which is available 
after the fixed changes of construction, maintenance, and repair have 
oeen met. This may be characterized as the free capital of the body. 
from this stand-point the main end of education, speaking in general 
serms, 1s to develop, in the individuals subjected to training, the power 
of making the most of their fund of free capital. 
Moral, mental, and physical training, each and all, aim at developing 
she power or faculty of acting ; in the first case, of acting according to 
‘he rules of right and wrong; in the second, of acting intelligently, so 
shat the modes of action shall be adapted to appropriate ends; and in the 
case of physical training, of acting as easily as possible, ¢.e., with the least 
oossible waste of energy in useless, irrelevant, round-about, or self-defeat- 
‘ng movements. Since physical training aims at perfecting the body as 
an instrument, and at rendering it the willing, prompt, and efficient 
servant and minister of an intelligent mind and a sensitive and enlight- 
ened soul, it cannot be gainsaid that physical training lies at the founda- 
rion of moral and mental training, or that it enters inevitably as a more 
or less prominent factor into most educational procedure. 
The success or failure of physical training, therefore. is not simply a 
question of the size and strength of the red tissues we call muscles, but is 
measured in part by our achievements in the domain of morals and of 
mind. In other words, we judge of the mental and moral worth of a man 
by the purpose, number, consecutiveness, and skillfulness of his habitual 
and ordinary acts, which acts, when viewed objectively and concretely, are 
reducible to more or less complicated muscular actions. 
The body is a communal structure, a kind of federated union of tis- 
sues and organs, arranged so as to form general mechanisms, having
	        
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