l the ranks (_tchini_) in order to
live for the purpose of passing the time, and to receive an unlimited
bank account, while the peasants, for whom this is not difficult, because
of the invention of machinery, do the whole business,--this is the
complete formula of the idiotic creed of the people of our sphere in
society.

When we inquire precisely what we are to do, surely, we ask nothing, but
merely assert--only not in such good faith as the Most Serene Prince
Blokhin, who has been promoted through all ranks, and lost his mind--that
we do not wish to do any thing.

He who will reflect for a moment cannot ask thus, because, on the one
hand, every thing that he uses has been made, and is made, by the hands
of men; and, on the other side, as soon as a healthy man has awakened and
eaten, the necessity of working with feet and hands and brain makes
itself felt. In order to find work and to work, he need only not hold
back: only a person who thinks work disgraceful--like the lady who
requests her guest not to take the trouble to open the door, but to wait
until she can call a man for this purpose--can put to himself the
question, what he is to do.

The point does not lie in inventing work,--you can never get through all
the work that is to be done for yourself and for others,--but the point
lies in weaning one's self from that criminal view of life in accordance
with which I eat and sleep for my own pleasure; and in appropriating to
myself that just and simple view with which the laboring man grows up and
lives,--that man is, first of all, a machine, which loads itself with
food in order to sustain itself, and that it is therefore disgraceful,
wrong, and impossible to eat and not to work; that to eat and not to work
is the most impious, unnatural, and, therefore, dangerous position, in
the nature of the sin of Sodom. Only let this acknowledgement be made,
and there will be work; and work will always be joyous and satisfying to
both spiritual and bodily requirements.

The matter presented itself to me thus: The day is divided for every man,
by food itself, into four parts, or four stints, as the peasants call it:
(1) before breakfast; (2) from breakfast until dinner; (3) from dinner
until four o'clock; (4) from four o'clock until evening.

A man's employment, whatever it may be that he feels a need for in his
own person, is also divided into four categories: (1) the muscular
employment of power, labor of the hands, fe