HEALTHY

LIFE

The Independent Health Magazine.

3 AMEN CORNER LONDON E.C.

VOL.  V                             NOVEMBER
No. 28.                              1913

There will come a day when physiologists, poets, and
philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one
another.—­CLAUDE BERNARD.

 AN INDICATION.

 It was the slave-woman who laid her child under a bush that she might
 spare herself the pain of seeing it die!

 One of the commonest sources of mental and moral confusion is to
 mistake the egotistic shrinking from the sight of suffering with the
 altruistic shrinking from causing it and desire to relieve it.

 The so-called sensitive person is too often only sensitive to his or
 her own pain and, therefore, finds it difficult in the presence of
 another’s suffering to do what is needed to relieve it.

 The healer, the health-bringer, the truly sympathetic person, does not
 even hesitate to inflict pain when to do so means to restore
 health.—­[EDS.]

 CASTLES IN THE AIR.

Regular readers will recognise in this wonderfully simple and suggestive article a continuation of the series previously entitled “Healthy Brains.”  The author of “The Children All Day Long” is an intimate disciple of one of the greatest living psychologists, and she has a message of the first importance to all who realise that true health depends as much on poise of mind as on physical fitness.—­[EDS.]

Of all the occupations which imagination gives us, surely none is more popular or more delightful than the planning out of future days.  Pleasure and fame and honour, work and rest, comfort and adventure:  all things take their turn in our romances.

Not all the castles are for ourselves alone.  In childhood it is our school, our club, our town that is to be the centre of great events.  The young man’s castle is a nest to which he hopes to bring a mate.  The mother sees the future coronet or laurel-wreath round the soft hair of her baby’s head.  And we all build castles for the world sometimes—­at least for our own country or our own race.  Sometimes we knock them down and rebuild again in rather different shape—­Mr Wells has taught us what a fascinating game it is.

Sometimes, especially perhaps in little, unimportant things, our imagination does centre chiefly around our own activities.  What we mean to do, what we might do, what we would like to do:  there must be something else besides selfishness and waste of time in the constantly recurring thoughts.

Who does not know the charm of looking down the theatre-list of the morning paper?  One may be too busy or two poor to go often to the play, but the very suggestion of all the colour and