Life is a verb, not a noun. Life is living, living is doing, life is that which is done by the organism.

The living of a tree consists in the action of the roots in obtaining food; of the leaves in obtaining air; of the sap in circulating, distributing these goods; and in the processes of reproduction. The life of an animal is more complex. He has a somewhat similar internal mechanism; he breathes, circulates, and reproduces; but with him the fumbling root-tip has become a paw, a mouth, a whole group of related members wherewith to meet his needs; he has more to do to find his food than just to poke in the dark. Living, for an animal, involves many interesting activities, and those activities are his life.

The life of Society is higher and wider yet. Here are the separate animal constituents whose life processes must be kept going, and here are the wholly new social life processes to be carried on. Human life involves the performance of the complex social life processes. The plant has poking, absorbing, circulating, breathing, and reproducing to do. That is plant life. The animal similarly circulates, breathes, and reproduces, but he “pokes” in a much more elaborate manner, developing also new methods of offence and defence in maintaining these essential functions. That is animal life. Man, as an animal, breathes, circulates, and reproduces in humble pursuance of previous methods, but as a social being not only has his nutritive process become of enormous organic complexity, but there have appeared also vast and subtle developments of special functions hitherto unknown: industry, trade, commerce, art, science, education, government,—all that we call Work.

In this development is human life. I do not mean that it is essential to human life, it is human life. If the gathering and circulating of nutrition, the absorption of air, the blossoming and fruition of a tree are “essential to the tree’s life,” pray, what remains as “the life” of the tree to which they are essential? You may truly say that breathing, circulating, and reproducing are “essential” to an animal’s life; that life, as distinct from other lives, being the more special activities he has developed. So with the human creature. It is essential to his animal life that he breathe, circulate, and reproduce; it is essential to his human life also that he perform enough varied physical activity to keep him in good form; but it is his human life to be “doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” or whatever is his department in the social economy.

Work is human life.

Thus, as health, happiness, and beauty are found in lower forms in perfect performance of their simpler life processes, so in Society we find health, happiness, and beauty in proportion to our performance of these our life processes; a greater, far greater health, happiness, and beauty in the magnificent spread and range of these processes; a far more terrible record of disease, misery, and horrid ugliness as we fail of fulfilment.

A defective, sick, or dead plant is an unpleasant sight. A defective, sick, or dead animal is a more unpleasant sight. But the depth and ramifications of misery and horror in a defective, sick, or dead society,—this is what has made us call this fair world “a vale of tears.”

Such a pity, too! When it could be just as healthy as a plant or animal! It is far more fun to be an animal than a plant, more exertion and so more pleasure. And it is far more fun to be a human being than a mere individual animal, far more complicated exertion and so more pleasure. With our vastly increased capacity for happiness our misery must be accounted for by “failure to connect” with the universal energy in one or both ways. We are denied our share of stimulus, we lack social nourishment, or, worse, we are denied our right discharge, are not rightly placed in the field of social action, are not doing the work which belongs to us.

It should be noted here that the happiness of social action as beyond that of individual action increases in proportion to its collectivity. There is a larger joy in perfect “team-work” than in the best individual play. Connected as we are, the sensation that thrills through the whole audience is stronger far than what is felt by one man alone, like King Ludwig of Bavaria in the empty auditorium.

If a man is rightly placed in the world’s work, doing what he is best fitted for to the height of his best powers, and if he clearly sees that by so doing he fills his place in the universal economy perfectly, then, granting of course that he is properly nourished physically and socially, he is happy. But if he is ill-nourished he is unhappy, not power enough flowing in; if he is ill-placed in social service he is unhappy, lacking right lines of discharge, his energy banking up and pushing against right doors that don’t open, and moving very slack through wrong doors that do. Moreover, though well-nourished and well-placed, if he is hag-ridden by some ancient lie about work being a curse, a disgrace, or some such idiocy, then he is unhappy because his own mind, clogged and twisted, turns on cross-currents of pressure that spoil the smooth flow of energy.

To recapitulate:

Life is action.

Action is conscious discharge of energy.

Discharge of energy is pleasure in proportion to amount, complexity, and freedom of delivery.

Social action involves greatest amount and complexity, and so, with free delivery, greatest pleasure. Our free delivery is checked by wrong conditions and wrong concepts.

By altering the concepts we can alter conditions and so make social action normal.

Work is social action.

It is the expression of social energy for social use.

It is essentially collective, and we find work most highly developed among most collective creatures, as the ant, the bee, the man.

It involves a higher degree of intelligence than the preceding processes. All the efforts of animals to take food are excito-motory, and either egoistic or, at most, familistic. They are hungry, they desire something, and they go to get it, performing whatever actions have become necessary in the pursuit. But work is the process of making, not of taking. It is not excito-motory, but the result of cerebral action.

The humble squaw who drops corn in her stick-ploughed field is actuated by a concept, a knowledge of how in time there will be fruit for her children. There is no present stimulus, she pushes herself, urged by the accumulating nerve force of the larger brain. Her lord, the noble Red-man, gallantly pursuing the buffalo, is acting merely as an animal, under direct stimulus of hunger and the visible beast before him. Being hungry, he hunts. Being fed, he does nothing. He can only act in the lower circuit of excito-motory nerves. But she, not hungry, makes the corn grow. She makes the tent. She makes the moccasins and leggings and beaded belt. She makes the dish and basket. She, first on earth, works, and she works for others.

First, it was only this mother energy, producing for its young; the same power which finds its apotheosis in the sublime matriarchate of the bee. Work was primarily an extension of the maternal function; and, carried to excess, results in that ultra-perfection of specialised maternity, the ever-bearing queen-mother, the ever-toiling worker-mother, and the contemptible, well-nigh useless, barely tolerated, and soon slaughtered drone-father. But human work was saved this hopeless limitation of maternity by being forced upon the male, and by him specialised and distributed. To work and save is feminine, tending to the swollen hive, the sacrificed male. We still see this tendency among us in that long-aborted social rudiment, the home. But man, assuming the industrial function, applied to it his disseminating energy, spread, scattered, specialised, and so made possible our social life. If the bees had been led to our great economic manoeuvre, the motherising of the male, they might be more than hymenoptera to-day.

Work, as an ever-elaborating discharge of energy, tends to develop under laws of inertia, like all natural processes. The “tendency to vary” in action is checked in the short circuit of individual animal activities by the immediate consequence of his own variation to the individual. This wonderful new step of ours, the production of food, gave us a new base for variation. A low grade of effort, by a few persons, kept us fed, alive. Our early specialisation in social defence kept us protected, alive. Being thus assured of life, though not on the basis of individual exertion, we acquired time to manifest new activities.

Here is one of the great keys to “the mystery of human life,” no more a mystery than any of nature’s laws, when you know it. A social life is assured by the basic industry, agriculture, and some degree of trade and commerce. Then the energy no longer required by each man for each day’s living can be given to invention, discovery, experiment. So follows all the immensity of our growth.

The social base being absolutely firm, and requiring less and less social energy as our agricultural and commercial processes improve, we grow in arithmetical progression—or in geometrical rather—as our increase in production and distribution multiplies our ability and our increase in ability multiplies our production and distribution. This assured base and wide room for variation is necessary to society in developing its higher functions. We can afford to feed and guard for several generations the slow-maturing genius, which, when it reaches the productive point, will richly benefit us all. We can give more rest and freedom to our members than any self-fed and self-guarded beast could dream of.

A thousand delicate and beautiful specialties are allowed to grow by our broad sure social base of supplies. So far we have seen this in conscious action only where a government has encouraged certain arts or sciences, or where an established church or endowed university has bred its kind of specialty, or again where some individual has contrived to enlarge his own “social base” enormously, and “varies” as he will, but we see its converse commonly enough where the individual is not allowed any hold on the social base, but kept at the self-feeding stage in development, thus effectually checking his “tendency to vary.”

Every advantage has its possible attendant evils, and Society offers a wide field for such. In the point we are treating, the evils are painfully prominent. As soon as we left the self-supplying stage, a man’s sins were no longer visited immediately on his own head. An animal gains or loses by his own behaviour. A man gains or loses by his society’s behaviour. In his assured position as a member of society a man can be wickeder and more foolish than is possible in any self-supported life, and he has taken advantage of his opportunities with great facility and zeal.

The peculiar treason involved in a social being’s offences we have not yet grown to recognise. It is as if your own teeth turned and gnawed you. Only a beneficent society could allow the growth of these powerful beings, and with that social power they sin against society.

As conspicuous an instance as can be given of this kind of sin is in the action of our misguided common carriers. Here is a function so glaringly social that one marvels at the power of the human brain in forcibly regarding it as a private business. On public land granted by the public, with rights and franchises granted by the public, with money subscribed by the public, and with elaborately co-ordinated labour performed by the public, this form of public service is established. Then one man, or group of men, is allowed to “own” this great piece of social machinery, and proceeds to administer it, not with regard to the public advantage, but with regard to the advantage of this managing group and of that small minority of the public who furnished the money for the enterprise.

Of course this could not be done if the social body as a whole recognised the organic character of its own processes, but, owing to the prevalence of our ancient ego concept and its derivatives, the poor social body says, “Of course; why should the arteries carry blood except to feed themselves, it is their business!” Against this evil comes the growing altruism of work, founded in mother love, in the anti-selfish instinct of reproduction; work, which, as it develops, carries with it an ever-developing good will.

Watch this in history. See the two forces as they affect society. See the primitive labour of the squaw holding the village together, the village which is the tiny seed of the state, while against it push the belligerent rivalries of the male. See the instinct to fight and to take, finding larger expression in organised warfare, constantly destroying the young societies which industry was building up, both in warring with one another and in the internal effects of the same misplaced instincts.

Here is productive industry steadily adding to the wealth of the world and developing distributive industry as inevitably as an overflowing spring makes a stream. And here are these destructive tendencies, with the primitive desire to get for one’s self, to get away from someone else, not only refusing to assist in industry, not only dishonourably living on its products, but so scorning and maltreating the real agents of social growth as to repeatedly destroy the societies that harboured them.

In the development of industry have grown the altruistic tendencies of mankind. Working together bred the social consciousness as surely as our physical organic relation bred our bodily consciousness. Peace, good will, mutual helpfulness are part and parcel of normal industrial growth. It is somewhat difficult to disentangle one current of social phenomena from the many crossing ones, some combining and some conflicting, but whenever any one trade can be studied in its effect on a group, certain associative psychic qualities are always found with it, and the general industrial progress of the world is accompanied by as general progress in social consciousness and the social virtues.

Agriculture brings us at least peace, an essential condition of its continuance. Trade brought the concept of justice, the market-place and its customs and its disputes evoking the early prototypes of our great courts of law, and extended peace. Commerce widened both still further.

The evils we commonly attribute to business life belong to the continued survival in it of anti-industrial instincts, not to the industrial ones at all. Where an individual enters the generous, munificent, kindly field of human industry with the equipment of a beast or savage, merely to get for himself all that he can, great evil results; but the same evil is found unbroken in preindustrial times.

Of its own nature work is altruistic. The more generally industrial a society is the more we find the higher social feelings developed. But the instincts of the pre-human beast, the powerful and ingenious self-feeder, still find expression, and the more so as society becomes more finely organised. Thief catches thief very promptly where all are thieves by profession and there is little to steal! But a large, sensitive, finely organised society offers splendid opportunities to these mischievous left-overs of ancient times.

The first step is mother labour, the next, slave labour, so up through serfdom to contract, to our present system of wage labour. The last step, one we are but just learning, most of us, though some entered upon it long ago, is man working for mankind; not under any primitive coercion, but from the action of social forces as natural as breathing. For whom should he work? What “market” is worth his highly specialised ability but this? Can he make bricks or compose dramas solely for his own family?

To associate in the complex discharge of our vast energies, and to be amply nourished by their countless products, is Social Life. It is true that work is essentially feminine in its origin, but not permanently. As it develops it frees itself wholly from sex limitations and becomes a social function in which men and women take part as members of society. “Women’s work” in one stage of our life meant every kind of work. “Man’s work” is now generally supposed to include the harder and rougher, the higher and more difficult. There is no real foundation for either term. Either sex can do either kind. Work, modern work, has no sex connotation whatever. Moreover, modern science has shown that the female, instead of being inferior, is, if anything, the more important of the sexes.

In no way need the association of women with work degrade either. A highly entertaining contortion of popular thought is seen in our local and temporary idea that women ought not to work! We have bred in certain classes a sort of parasitic female, most painfully aborted. It is more agonising and more ridiculous for a woman not to work than for a man, because of her initial sex-tendency and her historic habits; but we have bred this pitiful enormity and admire it as a Chinaman admires the “golden lilies” on his wife’s shrunk shanks. But this absurdity is already passing.

One of the effects of sex-distinction, falsely and needlessly associated with work, is seen in the general fighting attitude of the male towards labour. In current literature and current life we continually hear man’s economic activities described as a struggle—a battle—with some vague opponent called “the world.” He is described as “going out” (“out” meaning elsewhere than at home, the assumption being that he would prefer to be “in” all the time!) “to battle with the world for his wife and little ones.”

Katherine, the reformed shrew, makes an eloquent description of this prowess of the husband. This is held to be a noble effort on his part, and quite his place as a man, while if she, owing to loss of male provider, is obliged to go “out” to “battle” similarly, that is held to be unfeminine and a real misfortune.

The word “out” in this connection we should dismiss completely from our foggy minds. We are in the world once and for all. We are not planted in a lot of private holes, with the rest of the broad earth for a mere battlefield, a place to sally forth into and grab something. Can you conceive of a world of human beings contentedly staying at home all the time if their supposititious booty could be handed in at the door without “battle”? We don’t go “out,” we go “in” to the world for our natural and necessary activities, without which we should cease to be human.

What we do in the world is not, or should not be, fighting. Those who insist on fighting instead of working should be promptly locked up and taught better; they disturb the peace, interfere with legitimate industry, and dishonestly run off with the products of other people’s labour.

An oversexed male, full of belligerence, actuated by his primitive masculine tendency to scatter and destroy instead of the later-developed, feminine-based race-tendency to construct, goes forth like a savage to hunt and fight. He finds what he wants, someone else has made it, and he seeks to get it away from that person by exercising the same traits as those used by any hunting animal, force or fraud. We have an immense number of predatory individual animals, both male and female, all included and maintained by the social organism, yet merely feeding on its tissues; we have a still greater number, indeed the vast majority of our workers, who, though in reality engaged in productive labour, imagine that their business is to get something from other people, and so strive to restrict their output and enlarge their intake as far as possible.

The plain thief and pauper we recognise as social parasites, active and passive, and seek to remove; but our frank, general attitude of parasitism and predacity we do not recognise as an evil, the evil which necessarily tends to these ultimate forms. An individual animal has no productive power and skill, he simply takes what he wants when he finds it, if he can, and cheats, fights, or kills to get it. The collective animal produces wealth by co-ordinate labour. There is no faintest element of combat involved in the economic processes of society. The only “competition” legitimate in social life is the beneficent competition between constantly improving methods of service. For any collective animal to take advantage of his safe place in the broad-based social life, and from that vantage-point to take what he can from the social product without himself producing anything, is a treason so colossal as quite to paralyse our moral judgment.

Our little egoistic scheme of ethics, while it is big enough to grasp and blame an interpersonal fraud or theft, is incapable of comprehending this great field of social injury; and, if the social traitor keeps up the personal ethical standards we are acquainted with, we do not condemn his larger sin,—we don’t know how.

Here it is simply indicated that the initial error lies in looking at the world as a place to go out to and get things from by any necessary means, whereas in plain fact it is a place to go into and give things to—to labour in, to create in, to produce and distribute in, to exercise those social faculties which constitute our human life.

To work is to make something or distribute something; it has nothing to do with taking or fighting. The fighting and grabbing attitude comes from primitive animal egoism, a low rudimentary condition, and the morbid overplus of sex-energy in the male. The association of shame with work on account of the slave will pass when we see the orderly progression of human association and the place held in it by that early social functionary.

The Social organism requires a close and permanent connection between its myriad constituents. These constituents first began to combine sporadically, on lines of natural attraction, as in the family, and through the woman’s industry. For men to be drawn into the social relation,—men, whose whole nature was individual and combative, whose whole idea of exertion was to fight something,—required force. Only on pain of death, as the unkilled captive, did the slave learn to work, to apply his energy to the service of others. Most of the conscious associations of slavery were unpleasant, slavery and work were held as identical, and the slave hates work as he hates slavery. But they are not identical. Slavery is a transient, superficial relation, one of our telic processes, useful in its place, but soon outgrown. Work is a permanent, essential relation, a genetic social process increasing with our growth.

Men were first held together in exchange of labour by the force of the slave system as they are now held together in exchange of labour by the force of the contract system, an equally transient and superficial device. The real economic process going on is the gradual evolution of highly specialised and smoothly interrelated workers, with an abundant, easy circulation of their products, and the more arbitrary methods of developing this condition came first as more arbitrary political methods came first. The Owner was a primitive despot, the Employer is a constitutional monarch, and democracy is now working out a higher, subtler, freer relation—that of the true Co-operator—in economics as in politics.

The shame feeling, based on woman and slave, grew, rather than relaxed, in the period of serfdom. In fatuous ignorance of the source of their wealth and power, the fighting and governing class despised the hand that fed them, and the ancestral accumulation of this ungrateful idiocy gives us our ingrained contempt for “labour,” “trade,” “the working classes.”

The workers themselves, equally ignorant, though more excusably, accepted this feeling as correct, and strove to escape singly from the only honourable position on earth, that of Maker, Doer, Giver, to the supposed dignity of a Social Parasite. “The Theory of the Leisure Class” has been most luminously expounded by Veblen, but there is room for much more study in “the theory of the working class,” the glorious, irresistible, upward pressure of which, by its accumulating superfluity of rich product, has, besides all its good effects, made possible the morbid secretions and deleterious growths of society, the indolent ulcer of idle wealth, the waste of tissue in extreme poverty, the wide range of diseases, disgusting and terrible, with which Society is hampered in its economic processes.

This feeling of contempt for work, shame in work, once recognised as one of our evil inheritances from the black past, we should set ourselves to check and dismiss it as rapidly as possible. In the individual by consciously rebutting the old feeling and cultivating its opposite one of honour and pride, and in the race by an instant and thorough change in the education of children, through home, school, and church, book, picture, and story. It is gratifying to note that America is already far ahead of any other nation in its honour of work, and that even the woman-parasite, as well as the leisure-class parasite, is feeling it in this liveliest of societies.

Our aversion to work as being an expense of energy is quite right. Human work, as we have seen in the last chapter, should not constitute a draught on individual energy. When it does so there is something wrong. As in our constant analogy, the physical organism, we may be sure that when it is an effort to breathe something is wrong with one’s lungs.

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.

Social evolution is natural, and natural organic processes are easy and agreeable, unconscious if they require no cerebral attention, and, if they do, attended with sensations of pleasure. Granting, as we have done, that waste of energy is an evil, and any overdraught on our reserve fund of cerebral energy is naturally resented by the organism, it is still maintained that normal human work does not involve any waste of energy or any draught on the cerebral reserve more than is pleasant to expend, and results in increase rather than diminishing of that store.

The conditions of normal work are these: First, the individual should be well stocked. A sick man cannot enjoy work, a crippled, deformed person is not fitted to work, and a congenital pauper, one born without that inheritance of nervous energy which should increase with each generation, is unable to work with pleasure. But given, first, a normal individual, he should, second, work at what he likes best. This means social specialisation, and requires for its right development such education and opportunity as shall bring out all possible differentiation of faculty. So widely lacking are these conditions, so hampered is our choice of work, and so undeveloped our power of choosing, that we look with honest envy at the man who does love his work and can do the work he loves, like Agassiz or Lord Kelvin.

In normal social conditions every man would do the work he loved and love the work he did, so life and happiness would become synonymous.