So, their capacities more and more blunted, they acquire by degrees self-assurance which deprives them forever of the possibility of returning to a simple, laborious life, and to any plain, clear, common, human manner of thinking.
CHAPTER XXXII
The division of labour has always existed in human society, and I daresay always will exist; but the question for us is, not if it has been and will still continue, but, what should guide us in providing that this division may be a right one.
If we take the facts of observation for our standard, we refuse to have any standard at all: for every division of labour which we see among men, and which may seem to us to be right, we shall consider right; and this is what the ruling Scientific Science is leading us to.
Division of labour!
“Some are occupied with mental and spiritual, others with muscular and physical, labour.”
With what an assurance men express this! They wish to think it, and so that which is transparently the ancient violence, seems to them in reality a fair exchange of services.
“Thou,” or rather, “you” (because it is always the many who have to feed the one),—“you feed me, dress me, do for me all this rough labour which I require of you, and to which you are accustomed from your infancy, and I will do for you that mental work to which I have already become accustomed. Give me bodily food, and in return I will give you the spiritual.”
The statement seems fair; and it would really be so if such exchange of services were free; if those who supply the bodily food were not obliged to supply it before they get the spiritual. The producer of the spiritual food says, “In order that I may be able to give you this food, you must feed me, clothe me, and remove all filth from my house.”
But the producer of bodily food must do his work without making any claims of his own, and he has to give the bodily food whether he receive spiritual food or not. If the exchange were a free one the conditions on both sides would be equal. We agree that spiritual food is as necessary to man as bodily. But the learned man, the artist, says, “Before we can begin to serve men by giving them spiritual food, we want men to provide us with bodily food.”