ngaged in sedentary labor.

And so you see how individual selfishness, in this example of collective
ownership on a small scale, would act in harmony with the social
requirements.

[59] Thus it is easy to understand how unfounded is the reasoning among
the opponents of socialism that the failure of communist or socialist
colonies is an objective demonstration of "the instability of a
socialist arrangement" (of society).

[60] This is what Yves Guyot, for example, does in _Les Principes de
1789_, Paris, 1894, when he declares, in the name of individualist
psychology, that "socialism is restrictive and individualism expansive."
This thesis is, moreover, in part true, if it is transposed.

The vulgar psychology, which answers the purposes of M. Guyot (_La
Tyrannie socialiste_, liv. III, ch. I.), is content with superficial
observations. It declares, for instance, that if the laborer works
twelve hours, he will produce evidently a third more than if he works
eight hours, and this is the reason why industrial capitalism has
opposed and does oppose the minimum programme of the three
eighths--eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for
meals and recreation.

A more scientific physio-psychological observation demonstrates, on the
contrary, as I said long ago, that "man is a machine, but he does not
function after the fashion of a machine," in the sense that man is a
living machine, and not an inorganic machine.

Every one knows that a locomotive or a sewing machine does in twelve
hours a quantity of work greater by one-third than it does in eight
hours; but man is a living machine, subject to the law of physical
mechanics, but also to those of biological mechanics. Intellectual
labor, like muscular labor, is not uniform in quality and intensity
throughout its duration. Within the individual limits of _fatigue_ and
exhaustion, it obeys the law which Quetelet expressed by his binomial
curve, and which I believe to be one of the fundamental laws of living
and inorganic nature. At the start the force or the speed is very
slight--afterward a maximum of force or speed is attained--and at last
the force or speed again becomes very slight.

With manual labor, as with intellectual labor, there is a maximum, after
which the muscular and cerebral forces decline, and then the work drags
along slowly and without vigor until the end of the forced daily labor.
Consider also the beneficient _suggestive_ influence of