Our personal fund of energy is strictly limited, and nature’s processes tend to save it—the law of conservation of energy. Very slowly and gradually has been accumulated in us our private storage battery of nerve force, with its stock of arrested energy and its power to turn it on when necessary to modify action. This supply of energy is limited. This we must not waste; it is the hoarded wealth of all organic time.
This is the precious capital which nature subtly saves by rapidly making each action into a function, passing it over from the class requiring cerebral force, volition, to the class of unconscious, habitual action, where the energy of the universe flows through the smoothly attuned organism and costs it nothing. Any new conscious action costs us an expense of our own personal and private supply of energy, and that expense is what we instinctively recognise as wrong. The organism feels that it is being robbed of its most precious store, and resents it with every conscious atom. This is what makes us hate to work, at the same time defining work as “what you don’t like to do.”
Against this we clearly see the passive pleasure of a long-accustomed activity, the well-nigh unconscious discharge of energy along well-worn lines; and the active pleasure, the delight of doing what one likes to do.
Detach from work the false ideas which make it distasteful to us and there remains but one thing to blind us to its joy and glory: the waste of cerebral energy with which it is but too generally accompanied.
We have already seen that the accumulation and discharge of energy is precisely what an organism is for; it is an elaborate instrument slowly developed for that purpose, as a steam engine is made to “get up” and “let off” steam. A steam engine fired up and superheated, but doing nothing, must let off steam or burst. So a human engine, fired with all our splendid fund of social energy, must either work it off, let it off in mere fizz and whistle, or burst. Our leisure class—most copiously fired and fed and stoutly refusing to work—fill all the air about them with futile sizzlings and noises. They have to, or burst.
Normal work, i. e., that special social function for which the individual is specially fitted, requires but little energy to learn to do, because he likes to do it, and, once learned, runs easily for life, the pleasure steadily increasing with the power and skill. Abnormal work, for which the individual is not fitted, is a suicidal waste of energy, and we are right to hate it. It costs immense draughts on one’s vitality to learn to do what one does not like, an unremitting pressure of cerebral energy, a veritable hemorrhage of what is as much life as blood is; and even when the relief of habit is attained it does not grow into joy, for the creature is crippled in the dreadful process. A man may learn to walk on his hands and feed himself with his toes, but he will not enjoy it much.
The advantage of organic life is in its specialisation. Specialisation to one thing involves lack of power to do others. We do not ask a tooth to see, or an eye to grind corn. So the whole majestic advantage of human life lies in its organic relation, in its specialised, interdependent service, each for all and all for each. This is attained by means of a subtle differentiation of individuals, developing from generation to generation a rising fund of power, of skill, of joy in execution. In this differentiation comes at once the most benefit to society through the product and the most benefit to the individual through the process of making it—the work. Without it, in any arbitrary forcing of individuals to do this or that for which they are not fitted, which, therefore, they do not like, we find the main condition of social waste and individual suffering.
The laws of social evolution, acting unconsciously through us, tend to evolve a highly specialised, intricate, organic life-form, rich, powerful, boundlessly happy. Our conscious external laws and customs, our government by “the dead hand,” our insane reverence for mummies, tend to check, thwart, and pervert this orderly growth. We try to preserve the “all-around man,” which is as if we tried to preserve active monads in our bodily structure.
We try to force people to do what they do not like, we boast of our palæozoic educational system that it trains the child to do what he does not like, as if to like one’s work were criminal! Blinded and confused by inherited falsehoods; kept back in specialisation by our mistaken education; arbitrarily misplaced by superficial conditions; and driven, on pain of death, by our system of artificially distributed nutrition (not merely “no work, no pay,” but “This kind of work whether you like it or not, or no pay!”), the majority of human beings are not doing normal work. What they do hurts them; they do it under pressure of necessity; and they are quite right in assuming that without that pressure they would not work—that way! But this theory falls to the ground when the false conditions are removed. A free discharge of energy—the limitless energy of the universe through our intricate machine—is pleasure, not pain. It does not overdraw on our little store, but rather augments it. We are stronger instead of weaker for right exercise of power.
Every healthy child delights in work, to watch it, imitate it, take part in it. Every healthily placed man delights in his work, the man who is doing what he is particularly built to do—what we call a “born doctor” or a “born engineer.” “Poeta nascitur, non fit”—yes, and operator as well as poeta.