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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
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