The unsatisfied longing for rest in all mankind will be attributed to different causes according to the way we look at life. The physical or animal man desires rest because of the relief it will bring to nerves and muscles wearied by the strain of activities; he feels that to relax will bring him some ease and that relaxation will help him to forget the bodily weariness. Recovering from weariness or pain is a pleasure in itself. The sigh of relief is really a sigh of pleasure.

When the mind reigns, it instinctively recognizes that rest would restore the balance disturbed by feverish exertions. Our whole lives seem passed in a struggle to attain something, and the law of rhythm, which is the law of action and reaction, requires that, after struggle, effort should cease. One implies the other; neither effort nor true rest can continue steadily. Effort is the breaking of rest; shadow is only the relative absence of light.

It is contrast that makes sensations; the shadow serves to make the light brighter; the night makes the day more fair; and noon makes the night darker. Tennyson recognized this in the line, “Sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.” He might have said, with equal truth, that the present joy has a warmer flush because of forgotten pain.

Wagner understood that, and so we find crash and seeming inharmony so often a prelude to the softest, tenderest strains. The mind first wearies of monotony, even of harmony, and then ceases to be able to perceive it. Wagner saw this, and introduced clashing sound that seems like discord until we feel its connection with the emotion and the context of the piece. These relieve the emotions and throw the harmonies into relief. Says Hobbes: to have one sensation and to have it continually would be to have none.

The mental man feels and knows all this, and to him rest becomes necessary to restore that balance of things that contrast suggests—rest after effort, peace after turmoil.

The spiritual man goes still deeper into true conditions in his longing for rest. Rest carries with it the idea of attainment. He who has attained has peace: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you.” The unity of all three desires—that of the body, that of the mind, and that of the spirit—cannot fail to strike the thinker. To cease to strain is the keynote of ease. Why? Because man sees, however dimly, that agonizing, like antagonizing, is really futile, and that the only thing that is necessary is to put one’s self in harmony with the Universe.

Herbert Spencer has shown that grace of movement consists in the economy of effort, in doing every act with the least possible waste of power. The same thought is the basis of the teaching of the great Delsarte. As Ruskin says: “Is not the evidence of ease on the very front of all the greatest works in existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not ‘there has been a great effort here,’ but ‘there has been a great power here’? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all things; and this is just what we now never recognize, but think that we shall do great things by the help of iron bars and perspiration. Alas! we shall do nothing that way, but lose some pounds of our own weight.” The best way to attain anything is to move towards it with the least possible jarring or friction. In every struggle we lose force, because we are sure to make unnecessary motions. Men do not learn this from their daily work as unconsciously as they once did, because machinery has so largely displaced handwork. But, even in using machinery, he is the best workman who has learned to run his machine and get good results with the least expenditure of physical effort. Such a workman remains fresh for a longer period, and accomplishes more in a given time. The machine itself is constructed upon the principle of saving effort—it cuts out all unnecessary motion and reduces friction as much as possible.

If you watch a skilled typesetter at his case, you will find that apparently he is never in a rush. The beginner, especially if he is one of the more nervous type, looks anxious, pauses with hand fluttering above the case while he considers in which box he will find the letter he seeks; then, when he has made a decision, he will pounce upon it and deposit it in the stick with breathless haste. Not so the seasoned compositor. There is no haste, no fluttering, no waste motion. His hand goes unerringly to the box where he will find the letter he wants, in a twinkling it is in place in the stick, and another letter disposed of in the same way, and you are scarcely conscious of motion. The perfect workman is he who has learned to accomplish most with the least expenditure of effort. It is toward this perfection that Frederick W. Taylor and others are striving in the new “Business Efficiency.” Every day we are surprised to learn that what we gained by hard struggle has been gained with scarcely an effort by another. It does not always make us happy to learn it. We often feel as if we had been tricked, and we think that effort spent in what we now see was not the most effective way, was wasted. This leads us sometimes to persist in a mistaken course, because we are unwilling to believe that we have lost so much time and missed so much result. But no effort is ever wasted: it is only by the effort to do well that we can learn to do better.

Nothing is commoner than to hear our friends say, “I don’t sleep—the work is so hard and exacting I get dead tired and then toss about all night.” But it is not the work, rather it is the worker that is exacting.