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.”