1.H 02. Health and Thought
Health and Thought. As to the direct bearing of this bodily condition 011 your coming duties, let me say, first, men in a high state of health invariably see more sharply the truth that they are after. They see its relations and its fitness. They have a sense of direction, combination, and of the power of relations of truth to emotion. The old-fashioned way of preparing a sermon was where a man sat down with his pipe, and smoked and " thought," as he called it, and after one or two or three hours his wife saying to everybody in the meantime, " Dear man, he is up-stairs studying; he has to study so hard! "- in which he has been in a muggy, fumbling state of mind, he at last comes out with the product of it for the pulpit. It is like unleavened bread, doughy, dumpy, and heavy, hard to eat, and harder to digest. There has been nothing put in it to vitalize it. But when a man is in a perfect state of health, no matter where he goes, he is sensitive to social influence and to social wants. He discovers men’s necessities instinctively. He is very quick to choose the instrument by which to minister to those necessities, so that when he goes to his study he has something to do, and he knows what it is.
He is accurate in his thinking. Is there no difference in the varying moods of the draughtsman?
Take him with a bilious headache. Do you suppose lie can make his strokes so that every line of his drawing shall express thought? Some people say, " Why, there are times when I can do more in a day than in a week at other times; " which is true, be cause at those periods the system is in a perfect condition of health. Suppose you could have that condition always, what workers you would be! How it would sharpen your comprehension of the various relations of truth, and with what ease could you see and handle them! For all these things are largely dependent upon health. You cannot drudge them out.
Men are said to have genius. What is genius but a condition of fibre, and a condition of health in fibre? It is nothing in the world but automatic thinking. And what is automatic thinking? It is thought that thinks itself, instead of being run up or worried up to think. Whoever thinks without J thinking is, in fact, a genius. In music, it is said that it "makes itself." In arithmetic or mechanics the demonstration " comes " to you. You do not think it out, except automatically. Real thinking ought to be automatic action, and almost unconscious.
Under such circumstances your intuitions and your sudden automatic thinking, nine times out of ten, will be true; and when you send slow-footed logic afterward to measure the footsteps and the way over which your thoughts have travelled, logic will come back and report, " Well, I did not believe it; but he was right, after all." So, then, for sharpness and accuracy and complexity of thinking, in which much of your life ought to lie, you require the best conditions of health in the system by which you think.