ing a certain bilious temperament with a predisposition to envy,
or an anaemic or lymphatic temperament with a saintly life, and there are
well-attested cases in which an acute illness has fundamentally altered
characters, sometimes replacing an habitual gloom by buoyancy and
light.[3] That invaluable gift which enables some men to cast aside
trouble and turn their thoughts and energies swiftly and decisively into
new channels can be largely strengthened by the action of the will, but
according to some physiologists it has a well-ascertained physical
antecedent in the greater or less contractile power of the blood-vessels
which feed the brain causing the flow of blood into it to be stronger or
less rapid. If it be true that 'a healthy mind in a healthy body' is the
supreme condition of happiness, it is also true that the healthy mind
depends more closely than we like to own on the healthy body.

These are but a few obvious instances of the manner in which the body
acts upon happiness. They do not mean that the will is powerless in the
face of bodily conditions, but that in the management of character it
has certain very definite predispositions to encounter. In reasonings on
life, even more than on other things, a good reasoner will consider not
only the force of the opposing arguments, but also the bias to which his
own mind is subject. To raise the level of national health is one of the
surest ways of raising the level of national happiness, and in
estimating the value of different pleasures many which, considered in
themselves, might appear to rank low upon the scale, will rank high, if
in addition to the immediate and transient enjoyment they procure, they
contribute to form a strong and healthy body. No branch of legislation
is more really valuable than that which is occupied with the health of
the people, whether it takes the form of encouraging the means by which
remedies may be discovered and diffused, or of extirpating by combined
efforts particular diseases, or of securing that the mass of labour in
the community should as far as possible be carried on under sound
sanitary conditions. Fashion also can do much, both for good and ill. It
exercises over great multitudes an almost absolute empire, regulating
their dress, their education, their hours, their amusements, their food,
their scale of expenditure; determining the qualities to which they
principally aspire, the work in which they may engage, and even the fo