This social transmission of energy is Work. The forces of the universe flowing through humanity come in by all our highly cultivated powers of perception, and come out in our beautiful profusion of creative activities—in work. The conscious transmission of energy reaches in us a transcendent height of pleasure by virtue of our co-ordinate action. There is larger joy in “team-work” than in the individual play. The pleasure of dancing in companies, or the rhythmic motions of a drill, is not confined to those particular activities; but, in normal conditions, inheres in all smoothly co-operate exercise. The reasons why we do not feel it in those exercises we call work are not inherent, but purely associative; or else due to accompanying conditions of a painful nature. Normal conditions of human work require, first, that the worker shall be well nourished physically and socially, well educated to his fullest height of ability, and well-placed in the work he likes best and does best—(these two being identical). A worker, so placed, is in no way overtaxing his own energy, but is merely giving expression to the social energy, and finds in that process an exhaustless joy. We are so used to consider work as a drain upon the strength of the individual—and indeed in our artificial conditions it so often is—that we may not at first appreciate the nature of this fund of social energy. Let us observe its development, comparing the power at the disposal of a member of society with that of an individual animal. An individual animal is a mechanism adapted to the performance of certain activities, urged thereto by certain stimuli, and governed therein by certain instincts, and, perhaps, concepts. The activities of the animal are limited, of course, by his executive machinery; he has only the tools that grow on him. These are ingenious and reasonably effective, but their development is slow, requiring many generations of heartless “elimination of the unfit” to gradually evolve the fit. If his claws are not good enough, he dies, those having somewhat better claws survive; slowly the claws improve. He cannot in one lifetime invent and manufacture better claws, but has to be tediously and expensively “selected,” the whole beast sacrificed to the defective claw. Further, his excellence is checked by the interaction of parts,—all his tools being part of him, and modifying each other. The more things he can do, the less perfectly he does them; the more perfectly he does a thing, the fewer things he can do. The beaver, for instance, is a highly developed builder, but he cannot run well, or climb trees. Where you find the most perfect specialisation of an animal’s machinery to a particular function, you find the creature practically helpless otherwise—as the ant-eater. So we find the executive capacity of an individual animal limited, first, by his body and its slow methods of adaptation.