(1) Habitual increase of nourishment; (2) Habitual increase of work.
Let us now see what significance that has for our action and thought. It is unnecessary to deal further with the process of nourishment (I may even assume it to take place during the night’s sleep); then I have only to explain more in detail in what the work-process for a vital-series of the first order consists.
Since this work-process is taken to be completely uniform, habitual and familiar, its chief characteristic will be that it excites no attention from us, that we are not conscious of it. Such a uniform familiar increase of work is given to us in our daily movements, in the amount of light, sound, touch and other stimuli which are daily necessary to us. We arise from our couch in the morning strengthened and refreshed by sleep, provided, as we are accustomed to say, with a certain amount of elasticity; or, to speak in the more accurate language of empiriocriticism, provided with a certain uniform habitual increase of nourishment. In this alone is already contained a vital difference of the first order, a deviation from the maximum of maintenance. Now in so far as system C maintains itself, this demands to be annulled, and for this purpose all the accustomed stimuli of the environment form conditions for working it off.
Here belong even such uniform and familiar work-values as the home as such; the size of the room, the colour of the walls, the ornaments on the wall, domestic arrangements (in space and time), our parents as the confidential friends with whom we share our experiences, the tacitly assumed understanding with our fellow-men, their estimation of us, in fact all the thousand details of manners and intuitions which we have in common with our surrounding, details which are really active at every moment, but to which—so long as they are active—we do not attend at all. In all these we have most important work-values, which constitute our “ordinary,” if you like “philistine,” life, and to a large extent also the “standard of life,” work-values which we would not and could not do without, but of which we are not generally conscious until they are absent.[1]
Let us now pass to the second case.
It will not always happen that a given familiar increase of nourishment will find for its compensation just that increase of work which is suitable and also familiar. Indeed it hap-
- ↑ See my introduction to the Kritik d. r. E., under the title: “Richard Avenarius’ biomechanische Grundlegung der neuen allgemeinen Erkenntnistheorie,” München, 1894 (p. 119 ff.).
