The
successful employee of a corporation has not become disinterested in his
motives. Presumably he will not do any more work than will contribute to
his personal advancement; and if the standard of achievement in his
office is at all relaxed, he will not be kept up to the mark by an
exclusive and disinterested devotion to the work itself. Still, under
such conditions a man might well become better than his own motives.
Whenever the work itself was really interesting, he might become
absorbed in it by the very momentum of his habitual occupation, and this
would be particularly the case provided his work assumed a technical
character. In that case he would have to live up to the standard, not
merely of an office, but of a trade, a profession, a craft, an art, or a
science; and if those technical standards were properly exacting, he
would be kept up to the level of his best work by a motive which had
almost become disinterested. He could not fall below the standard, even
though he derived no personal profit from striving to live up to it,
because the traditions and the honor of his craft would not let him.
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