Sometimes when one sees people going about shivering on a cold day... one thinks how good it would be for most of them just to strip then and there, and run, run till they were red hot-mastering the cold that way. -from "Health a Conquest" Bracingly convivial and full of a spunky energy, this early motivational book, first published in 1904, is a spiritual but nonreligious call to creative arms to explore the possibilities of human consciousness to conceive and invent and brings us up to our physical and intellectual potential. Poet and activist Carpenter traveled the 19th-century English countryside delivering enthusiastic lectures criticizing the social conventions of his time, some of which are included in this series of essays, and his cry to abandon the repressive habits that prevent us from being fully ourselves continues to ring true today. British writer EDWARD CARPENTER (1844-1929) was a dedicated social reformer and active in the late 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement. Educated at Cambridge, he is remembered for his unrhymed verse, including 1883's Towards Democracy. Among his works are Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, And Other Essays (1889) and Love's Coming of Age (1896).