Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/265

251 fellow-men. In this sense, certainly, the artist or the scientist 'works,' the one to attain an ideal in the medium of sense-experience, the other in the medium of thought. But such 'work' is not 'labour.' The distinguishing feature of labour seems to be that it is the purely physical activity of man's body directed upon such physical objects of nature as can be manipulated for man's economic purposes in society. Thus, e.g., the planning and drawing of a monument is the work of an artist, the understanding of the laws of the stability of the monument is the work of the scientist, but the exerting of physical energy to fashion and transfer the physical material of the monument (stone, mortar, etc.) from one part of the earth to another and set one stone on another in the building of the monument is a form of labour. Again, certain forms of activity are exercised for their own sake, and others for further ends. Labour belongs to the second class, the work of the scientist and the artist to the first. Thus the laws of equilibrium of the spatial bodies that compose the monument may be studied and arranged simply for the sake of finding out the laws, and without any reference to the building of the monument or to any other end. Truth for truth's sake is the end of the scientist. But a labourer labours for some end beyond his actual physical toil, whether the end be the satisfaction of the end of the artist or the attainment of the means of comfort and subsistence for other members of society. Labour, then, in what we have to say, will be primarily treated in this sense. It is obvious that the claims of a "labour party" and a labour theory of society are soon dissipated in confusion if the term labour is taken to mean work in general. And very often the opponents of socialistic theories of a "labour state" have made easy capital out of a mere play of words.

We find different conceptions offered of the significance of labour in the life of man according as one or other of its elements is emphasised. Thus if we lay exclusive stress on the strenuousness of toil, the hardships to which it subjects the individual, the effort it involves, and the pain which often results from it, we get such a conception as that formed among the Hebrews—that labour was necessitated for man as the result of his fall from