The conception of work, thus excellently stated, meets a final difficulty which our discussion has already recognized. For work, under this view, maintains continuity, in spite of and even during one’s necessary rest. Here is the ideal of the highest work. The mind works continuously, when it has once acquired the genuine industry which comes through devotion to one’s task. In fact, it is curious to notice how often, after pauses in one’s work not excessively prolonged, one’s material has unconsciously advanced. Everything has grown spontaneously. Many difficulties seem suddenly disposed of, one’s first supply of ideas is multiplied, assumes picturesqueness, and lends itself to expression; so that the renewal of one’s work occurs with ease, as though it were merely the gathering of fruit which in the interval had ripened without effort of our own. This, then, is a second reward of work, in addition to that which one commonly recognizes. Only he who works knows what enjoyment and refreshment are. Rest which does not follow work is like eating without appetite. The best, the pleasantest, and the most rewarding--and also the cheapest--way of passing the time is to be busy with one’s work. And as matters stand in the world to-day, it seems reasonable to anticipate that at the end of our century some social revolution will make those who are then at work the ruling class; just as at the beginning of the last century a social revolution gave to industrious citizens their victory over the idle nobility and the idle priests. Wherever any social class sinks into idleness, subsisting like those idlers of the past on incomes created by the work of others, there such non-productive citizens again must yield. The ruling class of the future must be the working class. II. HOW TO FIGHT THE BATTLES OF LIFE II. HOW TO FIGHT THE BATTLES OF LIFE Many people in our day--even well-intentioned people--have lost their faith in idealism. They regard it as a respectable form of philosophy for the education of the young, but as a creed of little use in later life. Theoretically, they say, and for purposes of education, idealism has much to commend it, but, practically, things turn out to be brutally material. Thus such persons divide life into two parts, in one of which we may indulge ourselves in fine theories and sentiments, and, indeed, are to be encouraged in them; and in the other of which we wake rudely from this dream and deal with reality as best we can. Kant, in one of his briefer writings, dealt a hundred years ago with this state of mind. He examined the phrase which was even then familiar: “That may be well enough in theory, but does not work in practice”; and he showed that it expressed an absurd contradiction unworthy of a thinking being.