RESULT OF BEAUTIFUL PROPORTIONS. 413 



fight, endows him with his most essential qualities, and manifests 

 externally his power and his vital equilibrium ; it is this accumulated, 

 inappreciable quality of which we can judge only by the greatness of 

 his abilities and the superiority of his attitudes. It is therefore con- 

 stantly opposed to the form, even as fitness is contrasted with beauty, 

 .the contents with the container, the true with the false, the solid with 

 the brilliant, certainty with illusion, talent with knowledge. Form 

 and appearances are often deceptive ; without endurance they are 

 always so ; the horse becomes tired all the sooner as he possesses less 

 of it, and works all the better as he has more, precisely like the day- 

 laborer, limited against his will in his enterprises, if he be compared 

 to a capitalist, whose greater power of action is due to his possessing a 

 greater number of available resources. 



Such is the notion possessed by the mass of people upon this sub- 

 ject. It is reduced, as we see, to the pure and simple statement of a 

 result without any attempt to examine its nature. We feel that the 

 question is a difficult one, that its data are numerous, complex, delicate, 

 and profound ; but, through the ignorance existing at the present 

 time, a primary cause has been substituted for the secondary ones, and, 

 as in many other embarrassing questions, in default of being able to 

 surmount the difficulty inherent to the determination even of this 

 primary cause, we have been satisfied with a word in which truth, 

 prejudice, errors, everything has been summed up : endurance ! This 

 word no more interprets the phenomena which it aims at conveying 

 than the conception of the soul explains psychical facts ; that of force, 

 movement ; that of life, living organisms ; and no more than, within 

 our own domain, the conception of blood explains energy and ardor. 

 The time has, however, come for exacting more, and penetrating 

 deeper, by a methodical analysis, into the very essence itself of things. 



Work. First, what is work f 



To work is, essentially, to overcome a resistance, an action which 

 is defined in two ways, either as a force acting over a certain space, Fs; 

 or as mass moving at a certain velocity, 



In animal mechanics, the first of these two formulae, Fs, is gen- 

 erally not very conveniently employed, because it is always very diffi- 

 cult to estimate practically one of the factors of this product, the force 

 F, or muscular contraction. 



The second formula, on the contrary, much more precise, shows us, 



