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.