Publisher's Synopsis
From the PREFACE.
ONE of the many unhappy circumstances of this life of ours (which, after all, numerous really intelligent people rather dislike to leave) is the fashion prevalent in superior circles of deeming conscious and obvious happiness undignified. This harsh but permeating spirit of the old Bay Colony is not yet wholly dead among us, although echo of a day when to kiss one's wife or to smile on the Sabbath was a fault. At its very best it is all, of course, a part of the sadly mistaken notion of Brother Giles, for example, that the body, that miracle!, is "a devil's knight fighting against salvation," a prejudice which for fifteen centuries has kept the fair appreciation of the body and its victories far below its just valuation in the world's common mind. Joy, on the contrary, is the empirical index of the normal activity of unified mind and body, - the life man was meant to live, rational and unafraid.
And it is not the sincere and frank philosopher, truly learned in things as they really are, and wise, who belittles the adult's gladness of life, but the pretender, the pedant, whom, however, there are few to contradict. To him childhood with its pristine gladness, like womanhood, is at least a bit inferior, and childhood's joy a thing which man and woman should once for all put by. But the garrulous pessimist is almost always a weakling, a dyspeptic, or a melancholiac; and the vain gentleman too dignified to smile frankly, sometimes even when alone, makes others laugh aloud at his egotism. God is no dispiriter of man; and Nature, even at her utmost horrors, wears always a compensating sympathy to him who sees beneath her moods into the glad reality of our common but always transcendent life.
The present volume is an essay intended to set forth some of the hygienic and therapeutic sanctions of organic happiness. Some of its readers will find that it substantiates their belief, already firm, in the reality of joy's bodily influence; and a few of them may be originally convinced of it, those especially to whom "cold facts" appeal; while still fewer may see in the endeavor a slight but sincere contribution to the science of the relationship of mind and body, the two glistening sides of our soul's shield.