Action of the body on happiness
That this tendency is on the whole a healthy one, I, at least, firmly believe, but it brings with it certain manifest limitations and somewhat incapacitates men from judging other types of character and happiness. The part that circumstances play in the formation of our characters is indeed very manifest, and it is a humiliating truth that among these circumstances mere bodily conditions which we share with the animals hold a foremost place. In the long run and to the great majority of men health is probably the most important of all the elements of happiness.Acute physical suffer ing or shattered health will more than counterbalance the best gifts of fortune, and the bias of our nature and even the processes of our reasoning are largely influ enced by physical conditions. Hume has spoken of that ' disposition to see the favourable rather than the unfavourable side of things which it is more happiness to possess than to be heir to an estate of 10,0002. a year ; ' but this gift of a happy temperament is very evidently greatly due to bodily conditions. On the other hand, it is well known how speedily and how powerfully bodily ailments react upon our moral na tures.
Every one is aware of the morbid irritability that is produced by certain maladies of the nerves or of the brain ; of the deep constitutional depression which often follows diseases of the liver, or prolonged sleep lessness and other hypochondriacal maladies, and which not only deprives men of most of their capacity of en joyment, but also infallibly gives a colour and a bias to their reasonings on life ; of the manner in which animal passions as well as animal spirits are affected by certain well-known conditions of age and health. In spite of the ' ccelum non animum mutant ' of Horace, few men fail to experience how different is the range of spirits in the limbo-like atmosphere of a London winter and beneath the glories of an Italian sky or in the keen bra cing atmosphere of the mountain side, and it is equally apparent how differently we judge the world when we are jaded by a long spell of excessive work or refreshed after a night of tranquil sleep.
Poetry and Painting are probably not wrong in associating a certain bilious temperament with a predisposition to envy, or an anaemic or lymphatic temperament with a saintly life, and there are well-attested cases in which an acute ill ness has fundamentally altered characters, sometimes replacing an habitual gloom by buoyancy and light. 1 That invaluable gift which enables some men to cast aside trouble and turn their thoughts and energies swiftly and decisively into new channels can be largely strengthened by the action of the will, but according to some physiologists it has a well-ascertained physical antecedent in the greater or less contractile power of the blood-vessels which feed the brain causing the flow of blood into it to be stronger or less rapid. If it be true that ' a healthy mind in a healthy body ' is the supreme condition of happiness, it is also true that the Much curious information on this subject will be found in Rapports du physique et du moral de I'homme, healthy mind depends more closely than we like to own on the healthy body.
These are but a few obvious instances of the manner in which the body acts upon happiness. They do not mean that the will is powerless in the face of bodily conditions, but that in the management of character it has certain very definite predispositions to encounter. In reasonings on life, even more than on other things, a good reasoner will consider not only the force of the opposing arguments, but also the bias to which his own mind is subject. To raise the level of national health is one of the surest ways of raising the level of national happiness, and in estimating the value of different pleasures many which, considered in themselves, might appear to rank low upon the scale, will rank high, if in addition to the immediate and transient enjoyment they procure, they contribute to form a strong and healthy body. No branch of legislation is more really valuable than that which is occupied with the health of the people, whether it takes the form of encouraging the means by which remedies may be discovered and diffused, or of extirpating by combined efforts particu lar diseases, or of securing that the mass of labour in the community should as far as possible be carried on under sound sanitary conditions. Fashion also can do much, both for good and ill. It exercises over great multitudes an almost absolute empire, regulating their dress, their education, their hours, their amusements, their food, their scale of expenditure ; determining the qualities to which they principally aspire, the work in which they may engage, and even the form of beauty which they most cultivate. It is happy for a nation
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