358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ence ? I think we may. Some twenty years ago, a good friend of 

 mine and a good friend of yours, too, though you never saw him, John 

 Stuart Mill, delivered at St. Andrews an inaugural address on the 

 occasion of his appointment to the Lord Rectorship. It contained 

 much to be admired, as did all he wrote. There ran through it, how- 

 ever, the tacit assumption that life is for learning and working. I felt 

 at the time that I should have liked to take up the opposite thesis. I 

 should have liked to contend that life is not for learning, nor is life for 

 working, but learning and working are for life. The primary use of 

 knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as 

 shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are second- 

 ary. It scarcely needs saying that the primary use of work is that 

 of supplying the materials and aids to living completely ; and that any 

 other uses of work are secondary. But in men's conceptions the sec- 

 ondary has in great measure usurped the place of the primary. The 

 apostle of culture, as it is commonly conceived, Mr. Matthew Arnold, 

 makes little or no reference to the fact that the first use of knowledge 

 is the right ordering of all actions ; and Mr. Carlyle, who is a good 

 exponent of current ideas about work, insists on its virtues for quite 

 other reasons than that it achieves sustentation. We may trace every- 

 where in human affairs a tendency to transform the means into the 

 end. All see that the miser does this when, making the accumulation 

 of money his sole satisfaction, he forgets that money is of value only 

 to purchase satisfactions. But it is less commonly seen that the like 

 is true of the work by which the money is accumulated that indus- 

 try, too, bodily or mental, is but a means, and that it is as irrational 

 to pursue it to the exclusion of that complete living it subserves as it 

 is for the miser to accumulate money and make no use of it. Here- 

 after, when this age of active material progress has yielded mankind 

 its benefits, there will, I think, come a better adjustment of labor and 

 enjoyment. Among reasons for thinking this, there is the reason that 

 the pi'ocess of evolution throusrhout the organic world at lars^e brinsrs 

 an increasing surplus of energies that are not absorbed in fulfilling 

 material needs, and points to a still larger surplus for humanity of tie 

 future. And there are other reasons which I must pass over. In brief, 

 I may say that we have had somewhat too much of the " gospel of 

 work." It is time to preach the gospel of relaxation. 



This is a very unconventional after-dinner speech. Especially it 

 will be thought strange that in returning thanks I should deliver some- 

 thing very much like a homily. But I have thought I could not bet- 

 ter convey my thanks than by the expression of a sympathy which 

 issues in a fear. If, as I gather, this intemperance in work affects 

 more especially the Anglo-American part of the population if there 

 results an undermining of the physique not only in adults, but also 

 in the young, who, as I learn from your daily journals, are also being 

 injured by overwork if the ultimate consequence should be a dwin- 



