ise is no end in itself; in the second, the production of big
muscles by exercise is no end in itself; and in the third place, all
muscular exercise is expenditure of energy in those outward directions
which are not characteristic of womanhood, and which must always be
subordinated to those interests that are.

At this period of which we are speaking there are constructions of the
most important kind going on in the girl's body, compared with which the
construction of additional muscular tissue is of much less than no
importance. These building-up processes are, we know, characteristic of
the woman. Their right inception is a matter of the greatest importance.
They involve the actual accumulation of food material and the building
up of it into gland cells and other highly organized tissues upon which
complete womanhood depends. These all-important concerns are prejudiced
by excessive external expenditure, and thus the care necessary for the
boy at puberty is a thousandfold more necessary for the girl, though the
obvious changes in her appearance and her voice may be much less marked.
Greater and more costly constructions are afoot in her case than her
brother's, grossly though these facts are at present ignored in what we
are pleased to call education, both physical and mental.

If we are to decide what kinds of physical exercise will be most
desirable, we must come to some conclusion as to what is the object of
our labours, it being granted that muscular activity and the making of
big muscles are not ends in themselves. The answer to this question is
to be found in what I have elsewhere called the new asceticism.

In tracing the history of animal progress, we find that it coincides
with and has consisted in the emergence of the psychical and its
predominance over the physical. The history of progress is the history
of the evolving nervous system. Muscles are the servants of the nervous
system. In man progress has reached its highest phase in that the
nervous system, which at first was merely a servant of the body, has
become the essential thing, so that the brain is the man. The old
asceticism was at least right in regarding the soul as all-important,
though it was utterly wrong in considering the interests of soul and
body to be entirely antagonistic, and in teaching that for the elevation
of the soul we must outrage, mutilate, and deny the body. The new
asceticism accepts the first principle of the old, but bases it