Mental labor

“ Labor is either bodily or mental; or, to express the distinction more comprehensively, either muscular or nervous; and it is necessary to include in the idea, not solely the exertion itself, but all feelings of a disagreeable kind, all bodily inconvenience or mental annoyance, connected with the employment of one's thoughts, or muscles, or both, in a particular occupation. ”

“ A share in the production of this evil may perhaps be due to certain general habits of life which fall with equal weight of mischief upon many classes of busy men, as I shall presently point out. Still, these will not altogether account for the fact, nor is it to my mind explained by any of the more obvious faults in our climate, nor yet by our habits of life, such as furnace-warmed houses, hasty meals, bad cooking, or neglect of exercise. Let a man live as he may, I believe he will still discover that mental labor is with us more exhausting than we could wish it to be. ”

“ There are many kinds of labor. Some which are no less useful than others, are almost exclusively mental. You may make your own selection from a very wide range of employments, all, perhaps, equally important to society. But something you must do. Even if you happen to inherit an ample fortune, your health and happiness demand that you should labor. To live in idleness, even if you have the means, is not only injurious to yourself, but a species of fraud upon the community, and the children,—if children you ever have,—who have a claim upon you for what you can earn and do. ”

“ The result may be in the end a labor movement as hostile to the life of the mind as some terrified property-owners believe it to be at present.
The claims of justice, narrowly interpreted, may reinforce this tendency. It may be thought unjust that some men should have larger incomes or shorter hours of work than other men. But efficiency in mental work, including the work of education, certainly requires more comfort and longer periods of rest than are required for efficiency in physical work, if only because mental work is not physiologically wholesome. ”

“ To reason the matter, they will readily admit that labor exclusively manual having no share in the exercise of the mental faculties, cannot be considered to give sufficient occupation to an intelligent being; since the imagination would be left to the mercy of its caprices and the heart to the whims of its desires, which is not worthy of a being created to the image and likeness of God, who commands us to labor as He labored, namely: with mind and heart constantly supplying useful thoughts to the one and noble sentiments to the other. ”

“ Let the construction of the text be what it may, concerning labor being ordained as a curse, it must be the conviction of every candid mind that it was ordained as a blessing from the beginning of the world,—not that labor which consigns thousands to a cheerless life in crowded attics or sunless basements every hour of the twenty-four, in order to ward off starvation from the door, but the healthful, stimulating exercise for both body and mind every individual craves as the requisite of a sound physical and mental bodily development. ”

“ But, besides this, her work was of a high order of literary excellence, and full of intellectual power.
Such incessant labor is not to be held up as altogether an example to be imitated. There are some few whose duty it is to consciously moderate the amount of labor to which their mental activity impels them; and no one ought to allow the imperative brain to overtax the rest of the system. ”

“ There are moments in which the mind attains the highest and clearest perception,—seasons in which, whatever the nature of the mental operation, the faculties address themselves readily to the task, and labor becomes less a toil than an actual pleasure. ”

“ The popular mind regards cause as a straining agency which acts in agony of labor on resisting material, finally fashioning it and giving rise to the effect; such a relation is considered as constituting the very essence of activity. ”

“ This desire to get away from work seems to be connected with the fact that the men have started to work very early, before they had physique to stand up to it, or the mental vigor with which to overcome its difficulties, or the moral stamina which makes a man stick to his work whether he likes it or not. ”

“ Either the overstrained mental faculties revenge themselves by giving us the nervous, broken-down, mental type so common; or else we have the crude physical type wherein ordinary labor has exercised but a few muscles and joints. ”

“ I speak only of the vast majority, both cultured and uncultured, who maintain themselves by labor, bodily or mental, and must either exert themselves of their own unconstrained wills, prompted only by thoughts of naturally-resulting evils or benefits, or must exert themselves with constrained wills, prompted by thoughts of evils and benefits artificially resulting. ”

“ And now some will ask, "But why all this discipline of the body and restraint of the tongue? Surely the Higher Life can be realized and known without such strenuous labor, such incessant effort and watchfulness?" No, it cannot. In the spiritual as the material, nothing is done without labor, and the higher cannot be known until the lower is fulfilled. Can a man make a table before he has learned how to handle a tool and drive a nail? And can a man fashion his mind in accordance with Truth before he has overcome the slavery of his body? ”

“ For no greater truths exist than those words convey. People grow weary by labor, that's physical exhaustion; and of pleasure, that's sensational weariness; and of thinking, hoping, cogitating on a single subject, that's soul-tiredness—for all of which rest is demanded, or rather a change of attention and occupation.
The body is a laboratory, wherein the most beautiful and useful chemical labors are carried on; and it extracts and distils the finest essences from all things it manipulates. ”

“ Labour is not only a necessity and a duty, but a blessing: only the idler feels it to be a curse. The duty of work is written on the thews and muscles of the limbs, the mechanism of the hand, the nerves and lobes of the brain—the sum of whose healthy action is satisfaction and enjoyment. In the school of labour is taught the best practical wisdom; nor is a life of manual employment, as we shall hereafter find, incompatible with high mental culture. ”

“ But if this labour sweetens the cup of human existence, by giving that health to the body, which invigorates the mind for its studies—in short, if this mixture of physical and mental exertion results in producing contentment, the labourer, however high his rank, without deigning to revile the philosopher, may justly return thanks to that Almighty Power which, by such simple means, has enabled him, by dulcifying his "domum," to produce for himself domestic happiness. ”

“ The hardest part of the lot of genius, I suspect, has been not the emotional troubles popularly—and with absurd exaggeration—ascribed to it, but a disgust for labor during the activity of the fancy, and the necessity for labor when it is most disgusting. And, as it is not in human nature to endure suffering willingly, the mood in which such labor is possible calls for artificial conditions by which it can be rendered endurable. ”

“ Every human faculty is dependent on exercise for its development; labour is man’s means of support in himself, as in the world around him. The neglect of any power, mental or bodily, is its destruction—destruction of itself alone, if it be an unimportant, of the whole body if it be a vital function. ”

“ Meanwhile, the Creator, who is the greatest of levellers, has given to every human being both a physical system, needing to be kept in order by physical labor, and an intellectual or brain power, needing to be kept in order by brain labor. Work, use, employment, is the condition of health in both; and he who works either to the neglect of the other lives but a half-life, and is an imperfect human being. ”

“ New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work. ”

“ There are therefore two periods of existence especially prone to those troubles,--one when the mind is maturing; another at the turning-point of life, when the brain has attained its fullest power, and has left behind it accomplished the larger part of its best enterprise and most active labor. ”

“ When we contemplate these achievements of mind, by which manual labor has been diminished, and every physical force both magnified and economized, how unstatesmanlike is the view which regards a human being as a bundle of muscles and bones merely, with no destiny but ignorance, servitude, and poverty! ”

“ Certainly, right thinking naturally impels people to work.
We learned no theories about "the dignity of labor," but we were taught to work almost as if it were a religion; to keep at work, expecting nothing else. ”

“ The common and rude experience of men, laboring without thinking about their labor, teaches these things, and the very beginnings of the art and science of Intellectual Economy come beyond and after these.
What shall we say of those moods which every student passes through, which turn and return upon the mind, irresistible and mysterious? What are the causes of those strange and delightful exaltations of mind in which thought runs like a clock when the pendulum is off, and crowds a week of existence into an hour of time? ”

“ I continued, seating myself upon the box, “sustaineth the mind, but the activity of the mind being dependent upon the welfare of the stomach, even the philosopher cannot afford to labor without hire.” ”

“ True, this is not the privilege of every one; some have to do much thinking, and but little manual labor, while others do much manual labor with little, if any thinking. The latter class are as dull and stupid as the brutes, and when their labor is done, they lie down and sleep, like the brutes. They do not think enough, they should bring their minds into active operation, as well as their bodies. Men who do much thinking, philosophers for instance, should apply their bodies to more manual labor, in order to make their bodies more healthy and their minds more vigorous and active. ”

“ The harder a man works, at brute labour, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind. And the harder a man works at mental labour, at idealism, at transcendental occupations, the thinner becomes his blood, and the more brittle his nerves. ”

“ This fact affects human behavior and happiness profoundly, and the restoration of stimulation to labor is among the most important problems confronting society. The present industrial organization tends also to develop a type of human being as abnormal in its way as the opposite type of individual who gets the full amount of occupational stimulation by taking a line of interest destructive of social order,—the criminal or vagabond. ”

“ High and becoming purposes of social life and thoughtful enterprise superseded that eating and painful decay, which has terminated in the annihilation of the red man; and which, among every people, must always result from their refusal to exercise, according to the decree of experience, no less than Providence, their limbs and sinews in tasks of well-directed and continual labor. ”

“ Fatigue and restoration accordingly demand especial consideration. In a similar way emotions may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one ought to underestimate the importance of higher motives, intellectual, æsthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychophysical impulses of the laborer. If these higher demands are satisfied, the whole system gains a new tonus, and if they are disappointed, the irritation of the mental machinery may do more harm than any break in the physical machine at which the man is working. ”

“ The labor of the brain has exalted to a mere bridling and controlling of natural forces the labor of the hand—and you think you can perpetuate a system which reduces man, however degraded, yet capable of development, to the level of a soulless machine? ”

“ The necessity of driving myself to every piece of work, aggravated by the fact that my parents allowed my constitutional inertness to have full play, has hitherto prevented me from forming any regular habit of labor. ”

“ In these labors men doubtless learn to disregard in some degree these moods of mind; but the variable quality of the productions of one man on different days confirms what testimony we have of their existence.
The zeal or the indifference, the clearness or the dulness, the quickness or the sluggishness of thought, are doubtless to some degree determined by the methods of labor into which the person falls, and by the incidental habits and circumstances of his life. ”

“ Is intellectual labour to take ever and increasingly the place of crude muscular exertion in the labour of life?—then we demand for ourselves that culture and the freedom of action which alone can yield us the knowledge of life and the intellectual vigour and strength which will enable us to undertake the same share of mental which we have borne in the past in physical labours of life. ”

“ Experience tells us that the most of the inhabitants of the earth wear out their bodies without wearing their minds at all, through the sufferings they endure from hard labor, with distress, poverty, and want. While on the other hand, a great portion of mankind wear out their bodies without laboring, only in anxiety. But when men are brought to labor entirely in the field of intelligence, there are few minds to be found possessing strength enough to bear all things ”

“ Man must work. God works; angels work; devils work. There is no redemption for man, there is no progress for man or woman, except by labor — labor of heart, mind and hand. Labor of the hand must be first; it purifies the blood coursing through brain and heart. Labor of the mind must follow that the hand may be directed; and labor of the heart must come in that hand and mind, by commerce and thought, may rightly touch its fellow. ”