by
Gringonneur, are examples of what labor becomes as soon as the
serious motive of utility is separated from it. Labor, real
labor, that which produces wealth and gives knowledge, has too
much need of regularity and perseverance and sacrifice to be long
the friend of passion, fugitive in its nature, inconstant, and
disorderly; it is something too elevated, too ideal, too
philosophical, to become exclusively pleasure and
enjoyment,--that is, mysticism and sentiment. The faculty of
laboring, which distinguishes man from the brutes, has its source
in the profoundest depths of the reason: how could it become in
us a simple manifestation of life, a voluptuous act of our
feeling?
But if now they fall back upon the hypothesis of a transformation
of our nature, unprecedented in history, and of which there has
been nothing so far that could have expressed the idea, it is
nothing more than a dream, unintelligible even to those who
defend it, an inversion of progress, a contradiction given to the
most certain laws of economic science; and my only reply is to
exclude it from the discussion.
Pages:
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373