A further condition of good work is this,—that one should not persist in working when work has lost its freshness and pleasure. I have already said that one may begin without pleasure, for otherwise one, as a rule, would not begin at all. But one should stop as soon as his work itself brings fatigue. This does not mean that one should, for this reason, stop all work, but only that he should stop the special kind of work which is fatiguing him. Change in work is almost as refreshing as complete rest. Indeed, without this characteristic of human nature, we should hardly accomplish anything.
Again, in order to be able to do much work, one must economize one’s force, and the practical means to this is by wasting no time on useless activities. I can hardly make plain how much pleasure and power for work is lost by this form of wastefulness. First of all, among such ways of wasting time should be reckoned the excessive reading of newspapers; and to this should be added the excessive devotion to societies and meetings. An immense number of people, for instance, begin their morning, the best time they have for work, with the newspaper, and end their day quite as regularly in some club or meeting. They read each morning the whole of a paper, or perhaps of several papers, but it would be hard, as a rule, to say what intellectual acquisition remained the next day from such reading. This, at least, is certain, that after one has finished his paper, he experiences a certain disinclination for work, and snatches up another paper, if it happen to be within reach. Any one, therefore, who desires to do much work must carefully avoid all useless occupation of his mind, and, one may even add, of his body. He must reserve his powers for that which it is his business to do.
Finally, and for intellectual work,—with which throughout I am specially concerned,—there is one last and important help. It is the habit of reviewing, and revising, one’s material. Almost every intellectual work is at first grasped only in its general outlines, and then, as one attacks it a second time, its finer aspects reveal themselves, and the appreciation of them becomes more complete. One’s chief endeavor, then, should be, as a famous writer of our day remarks, “not to achieve the constant productiveness which permits itself no pause, but rather to lose oneself in that which one would create. Hence issues the desire to reproduce one’s ideal in visible forms. External industry, the effort to grasp one’s material and promptly master it,—these are, indeed, obvious conditions of authorship, but they are of less value than that higher and spiritual industry which steadily works toward an unattained end.”
The conception of work, thus excellently stated, meets a final difficulty which our discussion has already recognized. For work, under this view, maintains continuity, in spite of and even during one’s necessary rest. Here is the ideal of the highest work. The mind works continuously, when it has once acquired the genuine industry which comes through devotion to one’s task. In fact, it is curious to notice how often, after pauses in one’s work not excessively prolonged, one’s material has unconsciously advanced. Everything has grown spontaneously. Many difficulties seem suddenly disposed of, one’s first supply of ideas is multiplied, assumes picturesqueness, and lends itself to expression; so that the renewal of one’s work occurs with ease, as though it were merely the gathering of fruit which in the interval had ripened without effort of our own.
This, then, is a second reward of work, in addition to that which one commonly recognizes. Only he who works knows what enjoyment and refreshment are. Rest which does not follow work is like eating without appetite. The best, the pleasantest, and the most rewarding—and also the cheapest—way of passing the time is to be busy with one’s work. And as matters stand in the world to-day, it seems reasonable to anticipate that at the end of our century some social revolution will make those who are then at work the ruling class; just as at the beginning of the last century a social revolution gave to industrious citizens their victory over the idle nobility and the idle priests. Wherever any social class sinks into idleness, subsisting like those idlers of the past on incomes created by the work of others, there such non-productive citizens again must yield. The ruling class of the future must be the working class.
II. HOW TO FIGHT THE BATTLES OF LIFE
II. HOW TO FIGHT THE BATTLES OF LIFE
MANY people in our day—even well-intentioned people—have lost their faith in idealism. They regard it as a respectable form of philosophy for the education of the young, but as a creed of little use in later life. Theoretically, they say, and for purposes of education, idealism has much to commend it, but, practically, things turn out to be brutally material. Thus such persons divide life into two parts, in one of which we may indulge ourselves in fine theories and sentiments, and, indeed, are to be encouraged in them; and in the other of which we wake rudely from this dream and deal with reality as best we can. Kant, in one of his briefer writings, dealt a hundred years ago with this state of mind. He examined the phrase which was even then familiar: “That may be well enough in theory, but does not work in practice”; and he showed that it expressed an absurd contradiction unworthy of a thinking being.
The logical realism of our day, however, is not concerned with theoretical propositions. It turns, on the contrary, to the hard fact of the struggle for existence, in which indifference to others and absolute self-interest are not only permissible, but, as one looks at the real conditions of life, seem more or less positively demanded. These modern realists say: “The world we see about us is one where only a few can succeed and where many must fail. There are not good things enough for all. The question is not whether such a state of things is right or just. On the contrary, it must be admitted to be a hard, unreasonable, unjust universe. It is not for the individual, however, set without consent of his own in such a universe, to change it. His only problem is to make it certain that in such a universe he is ‘the hammer, not the anvil.’”