Many years ago I heard Mr. Thackeray say that he was sometimes haunted,
when his work was over, by the creatures he himself had summoned into
being, and that it was a good corrective to turn over the pages of a
dictionary. Sir Walter Scott is said to have been troubled in a similar
way. A great lawyer, whom I questioned lately as to this matter, told me
that his cure was a chapter or two of a novel, with a cold bath before
going to bed; for, said he, quaintly, "You never take out of a cold bath
the thoughts you take into it." It would be easy to multiply such
examples.
Looking broadly at the question of the influence of excessive and
prolonged use of the brain upon the health of the nervous system, we
learn, first, that cases of cerebral exhaustion in people who live
wisely are rare. Eat regularly and exercise freely, and there is scarce
a limit to the work you may get out of the thinking organs. But if into
the life of a man whose powers are fully taxed we bring the elements of
great anxiety or worry, or excessive haste, the whole machinery begins
at once to work, as it were, with a dangerous amount of friction. Add to
this such constant fatigue of body as some forms of business bring
about, and you have all the means needed to ruin the man's power of
useful labor.
I have been careful here to state that combined overwork of mind and
body is doubly mischievous, because nothing is now more sure in hygienic
science than that a proper alternation of physical and mental labor is
best fitted to insure a lifetime of wholesome and vigorous intellectual
exertion.
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