The
person who deliberates is lost, if the intellect that doubts and
weighs alternatives is less completely organised than habits. All will
culture is intensive and should safeguard us against the chance
influence of life and the insidious danger of great ideas in small and
feeble minds. Now fatigue, personal and perhaps racial, is just what
arrests in the incomplete and mere memory or noetic stage. It makes
weak bodies that command, and not strong ones that obey. It divorces
knowing and doing, _Kennen_ and _Koennen_, a separation which the
Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or
was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that
the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked
over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and
still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only
action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do
muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ideas
rest on a motor basis, but all really useless knowledge tends to be
eliminated as error or superstition. The roots of play lie close to
those of creative imagination and idealism.
The opposite extreme is the factitious and superficial motivation of
fear, prizes, examinations, artificial and immediate rewards and
penalties, which can only tattoo the mind and body with conventional
patterns pricked in, but which lead an unreal life in the soul because
they have no depth of soil in nature or heredity.
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