Under the term gymnastics, literally naked exercises, we here include those denuded of all utilities or ulterior ends save those of physical culture. This is essentially modern and was unknown in antiquity, where training was for games, for war, etc. Several ideals underlie this movement, which although closely related are distinct and as yet by no means entirely harmonized. These may be described as follows:
A. One aim of Jahn, more developed by Spiess, and their successors, was to do everything physically possible for the body as a mechanism. Many postures and attitudes are assumed and many movements made that are never called for in life. Some of these are so novel that a great variety of new apparatus had to be devised to bring them out; and Jahn invented many new names, some of them without etymologies, to designate the repertory of his discoveries and inventions that extended the range of motor life. Common movements, industries, and even games, train only a limited number of muscles, activities, and coördinations, and leave more or less unused groups and combinations, so that many latent possibilities slumber, and powers slowly lapse through disuse. Not only must these be rescued, but the new nascent possibilities of modern progressive man must be addressed and developed. Even the common things that the average untrained youth can not do are legion, and each of these should be a new incentive to the trainer as he realizes how very far below their motor possibilities meet men live. The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity. Our somatic frame and its powers must therefore be carefully studied, inventoried, and assessed afresh, and a kind and amount of exercise required that is exactly proportioned, not perhaps to the size but to the capability of each voluntary muscle. Thus only can we have a truly humanistic physical development, analogous to the training of all the powers of the mind in a broad, truly liberal, and non-professional or non-vocational educational curriculum. The body will thus have its rightful share in the pedagogic traditions and inspirations of the renaissance. Thus only can we have a true scale of standardised culture values for efferent processes; and from this we can measure the degrees of departure, both in the direction of excess and defect, of each form of work, motor habit; and even play. Many modern Epigoni in the wake of this great ideal, where its momentum was early spent, feeling that new activities might be discovered with virtues hitherto undreamed of, have almost made fetiches of special disciplines, both developmental and corrective, that are pictured and landed in scores of manuals. Others have had expectations no less excessive in the opposite direction and have argued that the greatest possible variety of movements best developed the greatest total of motor energy. Jahn especially thus made gymnastics a special art and inspired great enthusiasm of humanity, and the songs of his pupils were of a better race of man and a greater and united fatherland. It was this feature that made his work unique in the world, and his disciples are fond of reminding us of the fact that it was just about one generation of men after the acme of influence of his system that, in 1870, Germany showed herself the greatest military power since ancient Rome, and took the acknowledged leadership of the world both in education and science.