are well enough to consider where they point. What, I ask, should be, must be, the characteristic type of a younger generation which believes in cleanness, health, intelligence, swift mobility, playing the game, and readiness to stand inspection? When the younger generation disengages the object of its heart's desire from the rubbish with which it is now involved, when the younger generation has worked out the implications of its belief, what sort of national type shall we see? Well, every one of these indicators points towards a type resembling that which the Greek sculptors of the great period perpetuated in marble for the admiration of all times. The whole upward movement of our later American culture indicates a type of athletic asceticism as the necessary and inevitable corollary of our civilization. We can't have the sort of civilization that we want, unless we can produce in abundance characters of this type—the type of athletic asceticism.
I choose the word asceticism because it will be noticed and challenged, under the impression that asceticism means something sour, crabbed, thin, and starved. But asceticism, etymologically, does not mean that. Asceticism is a Greek word which means gymnastic. It means the rule and discipline of the athlete. It is not the self-denial and mortification of a morbid mind. It is the self-control and the self-development of a healthy mind. It is not a determination to suppress the life of the body; it is a determination to express the life of the body
