It is a very familiar experience that one may be almost dead from one point of view, but quite fresh from another, as one wants no more meat, but has plenty of room for dessert. Some people can rest by change of work and some cannot. It is very important for us to keep finding out in a great number of ways which of the classes into which people's bodies are divided we each belong to. Do we belong in the class of the people who must get their rest by giving up, by the abolition of all function, or in the class who rest by the change of function, by doing something different from the day's work? It is a question of fact and must be found out by each individual for himself.
Just here the individuality of fatigue, which I have been trying to make clear all along, becomes obvious. We are rested by making a success of something. If we have been making what seems to us a failure of something, it is amazing how it rests us to make a success of something. The boat crew that wins is almost never tired at the finish; the crew that loses is almost always dead tired. That is why it is so refreshing to go home, to have a home to go to, and somebody to go to in that home, because there you have a tiny success. You have built up that home; it represents your savings, perhaps, if you are a working-man, or your success in winning somebody's affections. That success is linked up with joy. Recreation re-creates us because it enables us to succeed when we have felt ourselves failures, or at any rate postponers. We are working for some "far-off divine event to which" (we hope) "creation moves," but moves very slowly. In recreation, in art, in beauty, in going to the theatre, dancing, music, we get at something where we can succeed, success by performance or by enjoyment and so be refreshed. One of the things that is always exasperating to students of industrial fatigue is that a girl who is nearly dead from working in a factory is sometimes made totally fresh by dancing. After being tired out by standing, she gets rested by dancing. It is certainly puzzling but not inconceivable if we take into account the psychical factors, which we are so apt to ignore because they are invisible.
One of the things we want in rest is success where we have felt ourselves failures, achievement where we have felt we were postponing, trying to make goods which we never see finished, of which we do only a little piece. To balance all that, we want achievement, success, finish, the present delivery of something that is enjoyed now, of home, affection, or beauty.
From another point of view, a test of rest is forgetfulness. Forgetfulness ought to be achieved in our recreation and our time off. When people ask, "What form of exercise shall I take?" we have to bear in mind that the form of exercise which is most valuable is that which makes us forget. The easiest form of exercise, and the least valuable, usually, is walking. Many people carry on while walking just the same train of thought that has tired them. If so the walk is nearly useless. For other people the act of walking is different enough from what they do, so that it will break the continuity of thought and achieve forgetfulness and rest. Well-to-do people who can run an automobile usually can forget. That has been a little good that has come out of the many evils of the automobile.
One of the good signs in modern education is that our old-fashioned gymnasiums are being stripped bare, the apparatus "scrapped," in order to give place to play a game. Playing a game gives us present joy, the first thing we want in recreation; and in the second place, it makes us forget.
I have spoken of rest through change of work. But the change ought to be such as sets free imprisoned, unused faculties that find no outlet in our daily work. It may be that marriages are made in heaven, but the marriage of a man to his job is very seldom made in heaven, and so mismating is common. The whole human race is too big for its jobs. The industrial system is altogether too small to fit us;—a large part of our powers remain unused. Therefore, the purpose of our time for rest and recreation, our evenings and our Sundays, should be to even up that balance, to use the part of us that is not used at other times. Sunday ought to be a family day, just because in the working world people do not see much of their families during the week; it ought to be a day in the country because we have organized these things called cities and live in them during the week. It ought to be a day of worship because we forget our religion so much in the week's work. Everything that we do on Sundays ought to be an evening-up of what gets crowded out of our week-day lives.
Tests of fatigue
The English tests of fatigue are nowhere near being applied yet in America or anywhere else as we hope some day they will be, to solve this tremendous problem of industrial fatigue and industrial disease. In some of the ammunition works in England[3] they took a body of people of approximately the same age and sex, living under the same conditions approximately, doing the same work. They changed the working hours of one set and left the other set unchanged as a "control." In any scientific test we have to have what we call a "control," something that enables us to compare the changes that we bring about experimentally with the unchanged state of things.
(a) In one room the hours of labor were left unmodified, in the other modified, first increased, then decreased. They made interesting experiments to see whether a man produced as much output, in eight hours as he could in ten; they showed that he could produce as much in the shorter time as he could in the longer time, presumably because he was less tired, less bored, less strained. They made a further cut and found that then he did not produce as much. There is a limit, therefore. He could not probably produce as much in four as in eight hours.