With clothing as with food, the usual tendency is towards an improper scantiness.  Here, too, asceticism peeps out.  There is a current theory, vaguely entertained if not put into a definite formula, that the sensations are to be disregarded.  They do not exist for our guidance, but to mislead us, seems to be the prevalent belief reduced to its naked form.  It is a grave error:  we are much more beneficently constituted.  It is not obedience to the sensations, but disobedience to them, which is the habitual cause of bodily evils.  It is not the eating when hungry, but the eating in the absence of hunger, which is bad.  It is not drinking when thirsty, but continuing to drink when thirst has ceased, that is the vice.  Harm does not result from breathing that fresh air which every healthy person enjoys; but from breathing foul air, spite of the protest of the lungs.  Harm does not result from taking that active exercise which, as every child shows us, Nature strongly prompts; but from a persistent disregard of Nature’s promptings.  Not that mental activity which is spontaneous and enjoyable does the mischief; but that which is persevered in after a hot or aching head commands desistance.  Not that bodily exertion which is pleasant or indifferent, does injury; but that which is continued when exhaustion forbids.  It is true that, in those who have long led unhealthy lives, the sensations are not trustworthy guides.  People who have for years been almost constantly in-doors, who have exercised their brains very much and their bodies scarcely at all, who in eating have obeyed their clocks without consulting their stomachs, may very likely be misled by their vitiated feelings.  But their abnormal state is itself the result of transgressing their feelings.  Had they from childhood never disobeyed what we may term the physical conscience, it would not have been seared, but would have remained a faithful monitor.

Among the sensations serving for our guidance are those of heat and cold; and a clothing for children which does not carefully consult these sensations, is to be condemned.  The common notion about “hardening” is a grievous delusion.  Not a few children are “hardened” out of the world; and those who survive, permanently suffer either in growth or constitution.  “Their delicate appearance furnishes ample indication of the mischief thus produced, and their frequent attacks of illness might prove a warning even to unreflecting parents,” says Dr. Combe.  The reasoning on which this hardening-theory rests is extremely superficial.  Wealthy parents, seeing little peasant boys and girls playing about in the open air only half-clothed, and joining with this fact the general healthiness of labouring people, draw the unwarrantable conclusion that the healthiness is the result of the exposure, and resolve to keep their own offspring scantily covered!  It is forgotten that these urchins who gambol upon village-greens are in many respects favourably circumstanced—­that