This mischievous error, incorporated in so important a religion, and forced upon the human mind for so many centuries, has done incalculable harm. In vain have later and wiser religionists protested that “labour is prayer,” a divine curse is not to be whiffled away by any such pretty phrase as that. It is not enough to receive a new truth, you must discharge the old lie, if your mind is to work straight. Our attitude toward Work rests also, however, upon other errors than these, the most fundamental of which are the Ego concept and the Pay concept. Under the first we relate our ideas and sentiments about work to the individual, in which position no understanding is possible; we might as well try to understand mastication in relation to a tooth. Under the second, we think only of the “reward of labour”; and have carried this absurdity to its logical height in classing the industries of the world under the phrase of “getting a living,” as if the maintenance of the worker were the object of the work. This again is as absurd as if we believed that chewing was done in order to maintain teeth. When we accept the organic nature of society, the whole proposition changes, we then see all varieties of work to be social functions, performed in the interests of the whole; and that the maintenance of the individual normally depends, not on a reward for the value or amount of the work he does, but on the general health of the social body and his having proper access to its currents of nutrition. Yet even this perception will not wholly free us while we are still muddled by the pay theory, still holding that a man or a society only works in order to get something, and that, in justice, there must be a return for the effort expended. This common assumption is accepted as basic by our political economists, and their further theories, systems, and alleged laws all rest on it. It is called the Want Theory. Fully and fairly stated the common definition of work, based on the want theory, is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by the individual in order to obtain the means to gratify a desire. This is almost universally believed. We accept it so fully that one of the steps taken by missionaries to arouse industrial energy in savages is to make them want things. As further manifestation of our belief in it we hold that if people were supplied with anything they did not work for, did not previously expend energy to get, they would, of course, cease to work. On this ground, honestly and logically held, every step toward free public provision for popular need has been opposed. Before going further in discussion of our common errors, let us lay down the main thesis of this book, advanced as the true theory of work.