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Updated: June 22, 2025
When he rides in a motor-car instead of walking she atrophies the muscles of his legs, hangs a weight of fat around his middle, and labels him "out of the running." If he persists in eating and not physically exerting himself, she finally concludes that he is cumbering the earth, and she takes him off with Bright's or diabetes.
It afterwards atrophies; but the relic of the atrophied caudal vertebrae and of the rudimentary muscles that once moved it remains permanently. Sometimes, in fact, the external tail is preserved. Three dorsal vertebrae, from a human embryo, eight weeks old, in lateral longitudinal section. v cartilaginous vertebral body, li inter-vertebral disks, ch chorda.
That is the way we develop ourselves mentally, just as we develop ourselves physically through sports. The mind that thinks is capable of deeper and broader thinking. Thinking begets thought. A muscle that is left without exercise softens and finally atrophies. The same is true of mental muscle. If this strength is left unused it is gradually lost and cannot be recovered.
Put a sound limb on crutches and you paralyze it; wear smoked glasses and your eyes become intolerant of light, or wear glasses that make the muscle of accommodation superfluous and it atrophies; take pepsin and hydrochloric acid and the stomach will become incapable of producing them; cease to chew and your teeth decay; let the newspaper prepare your mental food as the cook cuts up your physical food, and you will become incapable of thought that is, of mental mastication and digestion.
As a muscle grows strong only through use, so does every attribute of the mind, and every quality of the soul take on new strength through exercise. And on the other hand, as a muscle not used atrophies and dies, so will the faculties of the spirit die through disuse. Thus we see why it is very necessary that we should exercise our highest and best.
Regarded from this angle and supported in this light, the commonplace things of wearisome garrison life have as counterweights certain sublime compensations. These compensations preclude the false and contemptible results which come from intellectual idleness and the habit of absolute submission. If it yields to their narcotic charms, the best brain grows rusty and atrophies in the long run.
We have sharp, sudden inflammations; we have subtle and more deadly things, which men do not detect till it is, in nine cases out of ten, too late to cure them, like water on the brain; and we have slow wastings away; atrophies, which are worse than death, leaving life enough to prolong death indefinitely, being as it were living deaths.
To use tools involves using reason, instead of sticking to instinct. Now, sticking to instinct has its disadvantages, but so has using reason. Whichever faculty you use, the other atrophies, and partly deserts you. We are trying to use both. But we still don't know which has the more value.
Something of this kind is evidently in the minds of those who explain Darwin's agnosticism as due to atrophy of his religious sense, consequent on over-absorption in scientific pursuits, and who also argue that the "religious faculty," like a physiological structure, increases in efficiency with use and atrophies with disuse.
Here is something that affects us more than the finest or poorest furniture and that gives the real zest and flavor to any meal. The choice of our own reading enters here, not only the matter of reading in sociology, but of all reading, as to whether it blinds with class prejudices, intensifies caste feeling, or atrophies social sympathy by pandering to selfishness and sensuousness.
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