It is easy to see a great number of ways in which deficient quantity of food operates unfavourably up on the antral temper of the mind. As people are ready to sacrifice every thing to the obtaining of a sufficient quantity of food, the want of it implies the most dreadful poverty—that state, in which there is scarcely any source of pleasure, and in which almost every moment is subject to pain. It is found by a very general experience, that a human being, almost constantly in pain, hardly visited by a single plea.. sure, and almost shut out from hope, loses by de grees all sympathy with his fellow creatures; con tracts even a jealousy of their pleasures, and at last a hatred ; and would like to see all the rest of man kind as wretched as himself. If he is habitually wretched, and rarely permitted to taste a pleasure, he snatches it, with an avidity; and indulges, with an intemperance, almost unknown to any other man. The evil of insufficient food acts with an influence not less malignant upon the intellectual, than upon the moral, part of the human mind. The physiolo gists account for its influence in this manner. They say, that the signs, by which the living energy is ma nifested, may be included generally under the term irritability, or the power of being put in action by stimulants. It is not necessary for us to be very particular in explaining these terms; a general con ception will for the present suffice. There is a cer tain degree of this irritability in the frame of man. upon which the proper state, or rather the very ex istence, of the animal functions seems necessarily to depend. A succession of stimulants, of a certain degree of frequency and strength, is necessary to preserve that irritability. The most important by far of all the useful stimulants applied to the living or gans is food. If this stimulant is applied, in less than a sufficient degree, the irritability is diminished in proportion, and all those manifestations of the living ene which depend upon it, mental as well as , are impaired ; the mind loses a corre ,.. g part of its force. We must refer to the phi losophical writers on medicine for illustrations and facts, which we have not room to adduce, but which will not be difficult to collect. Dr. Crichton places poor did at the head of a list of causes which " wea ken attention, and consequently debilitate the whole faculties of the mind."* From this fact, about which there is no dispute, the most important con sequences arise. It follows, that when we deliberate about the means of introducing intellectual and moral excellence into the minds of the principal portion of the people, one of the first things which we are bound to provide for, is, a generous and animating diet; the physical causes must go along with the moral; and nature herself denies, that you shall make a wise and virtuous people, out of a starving one. Men must be happy themselves, before they can rejoice in the happmess of others; they must have a certain vigour of mind, before they can, in the midst of habitual suffering, resist a presented pleasure ; their own lives,' and the causes of their *ell-being, must be worth something, before they can value, as to respect, the life, or well-being, of any other person. This or that individual may be an extraordinary individual, and exhibit mental excel lence in the midst of wretchedness; but a wretched and excellent people never yet has been seen on the face of the earth. Though far from fond of paradoxi cal expressions, we are tempted to say, that a good diet is a necessary part of a good education ; for in one very important sense it is emphatically true. In the great body of the people all education is impotent without it.
Labour is the next of the circumstances in our enumeration. We have distinguished labour from action, though action is the genus of which labour is one of the species; because of those species, labour is so much the most important. The muscular ope rations of the body, by which men generally earn their bread, are the chief part of the particulars which we include under that term. The same distinction
is useful here as in the former case; labour is apt to be injurious by its quality, and by its quantity. That the.quality of the labour, in which a man is employ ed, produces effects, favourable or unfavourable up on his mind, has long been confessed. Dr. Smith made the important remark, that the labour in which the great body of the people are employed, has a tendency to grow less and less favourable, as civi lization and the arts proceed. The division and sub division of labour is the principal cause. This con fines the attention of the labourer to so small a number of objects, and so narrow a circle of ideas, that the receives not that varied exercise, and that portion of aliment, on which almost every de gree of mental excellence depends. When the greater part of a man's life is employed in the per formance of a few simple operations, in one fixed in variable course, all exercise of ingenuity, all adapta tion of means to ends, is wholly excluded and last, as far as disuse can destroy the faculties of the mind. The minds, therefore, of the great body of the people are in danger of really degenerating, while the other elements of civilization are advancing, un less care is taken, by means of the other instruments of education, to counteract those effects which the simplification of the manual processes has a tendency to produce.
of labour is another circumstance which deservei attention, in estimating the agents which concur in forming the mind. Labour may be to such a degree severe, as to confine the atten tion almost wholly to the painful ideas which it brings; and to operate upon the mind with nearly the same effects as an habitual deficiency of food. It operates perhaps still more rapidly; obliterating sympathy, inspiring cruelty and intemperance, ren dering impossible the reception of ideas, and paralyz ing the organs of the mind. The attentive examine tion, therefore, of the facts of this case, as a matter of first rate importance. Two things are absolutely certain :—that without the bodily labour of the great bulk of mankind, the well-being of the species can not be obtained ;--and that, with the bodily labour of the great bulk of mankind, carried beyond a cer tain extent, neither intellect, virtue, nor happiness can flourish upon the earth. What, then, is that pre cious middle point, at which the greatest quantity of good is obtained with the smallest quantity of evil, is, m this part of the subject, the problem to be solved.
The state of defective food and excessive labour, is the state in which we find the great bulk of man kind; the state in which. they are either constantly existing, or into which they are every moment threat ening to fall. Theie are two, therefore, in settling the rank among the circumstances which concur in determining the degree of intellect and morality ca pable of being exhibited in the societies of men, which ought to stand in a very eminent place : the mode of increasing to the utmost, the quantity of intellect, morality, and happiness, in human society, will be very imperfectly understood, till they obtain a neNT degree of consideration.
We named, still farther, the physical cir cumstances which contribute to give permanent cha racters to the mind, air, temperature, action, and rest. But of these we must leave the illustration wholly to other inquirers. It is mortifying to be obliged to leave a subject, on which so much depends, and for which so little has been done, with so very imper fect an attempt for its improvement. We shall, however, have performed a service of some utility to education, if what we have said has any tendency to lead men to a juster estimate of the physical cir cumstances which concur in fashioning the human mind, and hence to greater industry and care in studying and applying them.