Mental efficiency : and other hints to men and women / by Arnold Bennett.

  • Arnold Bennett
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Mental efficiency : and other hints to men and women / by Arnold Bennett. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/168 (page 5)
    the conclusion that I had carried physical efficiency quite far enough. A strange thing—was it not ?—that I never had the idea of devoting a quarter of an hour a day after shaving to the pursuit of mental efficiency. The average body is a pretty complicated affair, sadly out of order, but happily susceptible to culture. The average mind is vastly more complicated, not less sadly out of order, but perhaps even more susceptible to culture. We compare our arms to the arms of the gentleman illustrated in the physical efficiency advertisement, and we murmur to ourselves the classic phrase : “ This will never do.” And we set about developing the muscles of our arms until we can show them off (through a frock coat) to women at afternoon tea. But it does not, perhaps, occur to us that the mind has its muscles, and a lot of ap- paratus besides, and that these invisible, yet paramount, mental organs are far less efficient than they ought to be; that some of them are atrophied, others starved,