This explanation may be very philosophical, but it is only a roundabout way of saying that, within reasonable bounds, we can recover the effects of exhaustion by proper food and rest; which, as a fact, people are pretty well acquainted with. The error to be avoided is, in any shape to make such a pull on the constitution as to be beyond the reach of recovery. Life-force, or call it protoplasm, is an inherent quantity not to be heedlessly wasted; and this truth becomes more apparent the older we grow. Why is one man greater, in the sense of being more powerful than another? Because he knows how to get out of himself a greater amount of work with less waste of life-force.
We see from experience that the more men have to do the more they can do. And this paradox is only reasonable, for it is the necessity of great work that forces upon us systematic habits, and teaches us to economise the power that is in us. With the cares of an empire on their shoulders, prime-ministers can make time to write novels, Homeric studies, anti-papal pamphlets. It is the busy-idle man who never loses an opportunity of assuring you that 'he has not a moment in the day to himself, and that really he has no time to look round him.' Of course idle people have no time to spare, because they have never learned how to save the odd minutes of the day, and because their vital energy is expended in fuss rather than in work.
'He hath no leisure,' says George Herbert, 'who useth it not;' that is to say, he who does not save time for his work when he can, is always in a hurry. One of the most sublime conceptions of the Deity we can form is that He is never idle, and never in a hurry.
The following words from a newspaper description of the sublime calmness of power manifested by the huge hydraulic crane used to lift Fraser's celebrated eighty-one ton gun, we take as our type of the powerful man who knows how to economise his vital force instead of wasting it by fussing: 'Is there not something sublime in a hydraulic crane which lifts a Titanic engine of destruction weighing eighty-one tons to a considerable height above the pier, with as noiseless a calm and as much absence of apparent stress or strain as if it had been a boy-soldier's pop-gun? When we further read of the hydraulic monster holding up its terrible burden motionless in mid-air until it is photographed, and then lowering it gently and quietly on a sort of extemporised cradle without the least appearance of difficulty, one can readily understand that the mental impression produced on the bystanders must have been so solemn as to manifest itself in most eloquent silence.' With the same freedom from excitement and difficulty does the strong man who saves his force for worthy objects, raise up morally and physically depressed nations, take cities, or what is harder to do still, rule his own spirit. It is the fashion nowadays to say that people are killed or turned into lunatics by overwork, and no doubt there is much truth in the complaint. Nevertheless it would seem that vital force is wasted almost as much by the idle man as by him who overworks himself at high-pressure for the purpose of 'getting on.' It is indolence which exhausts, by allowing the entrance of fretful thoughts into the mind; not action, in which there is health and pleasure. We never knew a man without a profession who did not seem always to be busy. It may be he was occupied in worrying about the dinner or the place where he should spend his holiday--which he did not work for--in correcting his wife, in inventing pleasures, and abusing them when found, in turning the house upside down by doing little jobs foolishly supposed to be useful. And women too, when stretched on the rack of a too-easy chair, are they not forced to confess that there is as much vital force required to enable them to endure the 'pains and penalties of idleness,' as would, if rightly directed, render them useful, and therefore happy? The fact is there are far more who die of selfishness and idleness than of overwork, for where men break down by overwork it is generally from not taking care to order their lives and obey the physical laws of health.