e be something ugly and discouraging and unworthy. But the
real mental facts allow just as well the opposite argument. The mere
change and variation, going from one thing to another, makes the mind
restless and distracted, without inner unity and harmony. To be loyal
to one task and to continue it faithfully and insistently, brings that
perfect adjustment of the mind in which every new act is welcome
because it has become the habit ingrained in the personality. To be
sure there are individual differences. We have in political life, too,
radicals who get more satisfaction from change, and conservatives who
prefer continuity of traditions; and so the whole mental structure of
some men is better adjusted to a frequent variation in work, and that
of others better prepared for continuity. The one has a temperament
which may lead him from one occupation to another, from one town to
another, from one flat to another, from one set of companions to
another. But there is the opposite type of minds. To them it is far
more welcome to continue throughout life at the same work, in the same
old home, in touch with the same dear friends. Many minds surely are
better fitted for alternation in their activities, but many others,
and they certainly are not the worst, are naturally much better
adapted to a regular repetition. There are opportunities for both
types of mental behaviour in the workshop of the nation, and the
peaceful adjustment is disturbed only by the hasty theory that
repetition is a lower class of work, which makes man a mere machine
and that it is therefore to be despised. Change the theory about
uniformity, and you remove monotony from the industrial world.
Monotony is only the uniformity which is hated.

Do we not see that power of theories and ideas everywhere around us,
even in the most trivial things? The most splendid gown is nothing but
an object of contempt if it is the fashion of the day before
yesterday. In lands where titles and decorations are a traditional
idea, the little piece of tin may be more coveted than any treasures
of wealth. Through ideas only can the great social question be solved.
No distribution of income can change in the least the total sum of
pleasure and displeasure in the world, and the socialistic scheme is
of all the useless efforts to increase pleasure and to decrease
displeasure the least desirable, because it works, as we have seen, at
the same time against those mental functions which