LIBRARY . -iNI BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION A Library of Business Principles, Practice, and Experience Editor-in-Chief WALTER D. MOODY Late General Manager, Chicago Association of Commerce Managing Director, Chicago Plan Commission Author, "Men Who Sell Things" Managing Editor WILLIAM BETHKE, M.A. General Educational Director and Secretary LaSalle Extension University LASALLE EXTENSION UNIVERSITY BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Being an organized presentation of the prob- lems of business management prepared by an unusual group of successful and authoritative Organizers, Educators, and Business Experts IRVING R. ALLEN Viet President, H. W. Kastor 6 Sonj Advertising Company, Chicago WILLIAM BETHKE, M.A. Educational Director LaSalle Extension University ERNEST LUDLOW BOGART, Ph.D. Ileid of Department of Economics University of Illinois THEODORE E. BURTON, LL.D. Former United States Senator HARRY J. CARPENTER National Bank of Commerce New York J. VV. COBEY Formerly Traffic Manager, National Cask Register Company E. F. DAHM, B.A. Associate Educational Director LaSalle Extension University Formerly Assistant Director Retail Research A ssociation HUGO DIEMER, M.E. Director of Industrial Courses LaSalle Extension University Formerly Personnel Superintendent Winchester Repeating Arms Company COLEMAN DUPONT Chairman, Equitable Office Building Corporation, New York B. C. FORBES Business and Financial Writer LOUIS GUENTHER Editor, "Financial World" ARTHUR B. HALL. A.B. Hall 6* Ellis, Real Estate, Chicago FRED L. HAM, M.B.A. Director, Department of Business Administration, LaSalle Extension University F. C. HENDERSCHOTT New York Edison Company SAMUEL D. HIRSCHL, S.B., J.D. HARRY ARTHUR HOPF, M.C.S. Organization Counsel Federal Reserve Bank, New York B. OLNEY HOUGH Editor, "American Exporter" E. H. KASTOR H. W. Kastor (f Sons Advertising Company, Chicago PERCY H. JOHNSTON President. Chemical National Bank New York EDWIN HERBERT LEWIS, Ph D., LL.D. Lewis Institute, Chicago WALTER D. MOODY Late Managing Director Chicago Plan Commission HUGO MUNSTERBERG, Ph.D., LL.D. PAUL H. NYSTROM, Ph.D. Director, Retail Research Association New York C. C. PARSONS Secretary-Treasurer, Collateral Mortgage Corporation of New York JOSEPH M. REGAN Editor, "Bankers' Monthly" ALEXANDER H. REVELL President, Alexander H. Revell & Company, Chicago GEORGE E. ROBERTS Vice President, National City Bank New York MAURICE H. ROBINSON, Ph.D. Professor of Industry University of Illinois STANLEY H. ROSE Foreign Sales Manager Barber Asphalt Company CHARLES M. SCHWAB Bethlehem Steel Corporation I. LEO SHARFMAN Professor of Political Economy University of Michigan EDWARD M. SKINNER General Manager, Wilson Brothers Chicago J. F. STROMBECK President, Strombeck-Becker Manufacturing Company, Moline, Illinois THEODORE N. VAIL Late President, A merican Telephone and Telegraph Company F. E. WEAKLY General Office Manager, Halsey, Stuart & Company R. S. WHITE Collection Manager, American Steel and Wire Company, Chicago H. PARKER WILLIS, Ph.D. Professor of Banking Columbia University Director of Research, Federal Reserve Board JOHN NORTH WILLYS President, Willys-Overland Company RICHARD P. WILSON Batavia Rubber Corrpany BUSINESS PSYCHOLOGY HUGO MUNSTERBERG, Ph.D., M.D., LL.D. Late Professor of Psychology, Harvard Unirersity; Author of Pij(klu and Lift, Ptjthttktr*pj, Ptychtltgy **d Induttrial Ifeiimey, etc. 1 .1 13 F-. -JjL '* --^ La Salle Extension University Chic a go * .1924 Copyright, 1918 All Rights Reserved in All CountnM LaSalle Extension University Printed in the U.S.A. PREFACE The understanding of psychology is one of the most important roads to success for the modern business man. Industrial and commercial work are in thousand-fold con- tact with the mental life. Salesmanship and advertising, learning and training for technical labor, choosing the right position and selecting the right employe, greatest efficiency at work and avoidance of fatigue, treatment of customers and of partners, securing the most favorable conditions for work and adapting the work to one's lik- ing, and ever so many other problems stand today before the business world and cannot be answered but by psy- chology. To reach such an understanding it is not necessary that the business man enter into the depths of all those dark questions over which the scientific psychologists are wrangling. The scholarly volumes on psychology written for specialists certainly contain much which would be of no importance for the practical man. It is the aim of this volume on business psychology to bring together those results of modern psychological thinking which are sig- nificant for the work of the business man. Yet business psychology too is, after all, psychology, that is, a science which needs serious and penetrating study. No one ought to believe that a science can be mastered in any other way than by serious study. Such a study involves, first of all, the laying of solid foundations. "We must therefore plod through much ma- terial which seems at a superficial glance unimportant vi Preface for a business man. The first half of the volume hardly speaks of buying and selling and advertising and select- ing workers. It is devoted to a careful treatment of per- ceptions and memories and feelings, but this apparently unpractical study is needed if the later practical discus- sions are not to hang in the air. Above all, the volume speaks throughout the serious language of science. Those who fancy that business affairs ought to be treated in the snappy way of the popu- lar business literature will feel and ought to feel disap- pointed. Such gingery talks about business as are usu- ally offered to business men are very entertaining and amusing and sometimes stimulating, but they are entirely unfit to convey that thorough understanding which can be gained only by a slow upbuilding through serious study of difficult material. The business man cannot doubt that imitations can never fill the place of the real goods. There is no substitute for thorough study. HABTABD UNTVIBSITT. HUGO MttNSTERBEBG. CONTENTS L BUSINESS AND PSYCHOLOGY Cultural Progress 1 Science in Industry 2 Psychology in Industry 3 The Power of the Mind in Business 5 """ How to Study Business Psychology 7 IT. SCOPE AND METHODS OP PSYCHOLOGY The Old v. the New Psychology 10 The Experimental Method 11 A Modern Psychological Laboratory 13 Object of Experiments 14 Animal Intelligence 15 Abnormal Psychology 16 Psychology and Mysticism 16 TTT. THE APPLICATION OP PSYCHOLOGY Prevailing Prejudice Against Applied Psy- chology 18 Application in the Schools 19 Application in Medicine 21 Application in Law 21 "Wider Application to Life 22 - Application to Business 24 IV. THE MIND AND THE BODY The Material for Psychological Study 27 The Individual's Consciousness 28 Consciousness Revealed by Behavior 30 The Perceptions 32 Will- Actions 33 The Unity of Bodily and Mental Life 33 The Functions of the Brain 35 The Neurons 36 The Physical Basis of Human Behavior 38 The Practical Problem 39 The Three Great Factors of the Mind 40 vii viii Contents V. SENSATION Nature of Sensation 42 Complexity of Sensations 44 Light Impressions 44 Sound Sensations 49 Taste and Smell Sensations 51 Our So-called Fifth Sense 52 Bodily Sensations 54 VI. THE PERCEPTIONS Grouping of Our Sensations 57 Space Form of Our Impressions 58 Visual Illusions 60 Perception of Distance 64 Space Perception in Various Parts of the Body. 66 Localization of Sounds 67 Perception of Time 68 Meaning and Impressions 70 VII. MEMORY AND IDEAS Memory 's Influence on Actions 73 Impression v. Its Reproduction 75 Reproduction of Impressions. 77 Laws of Memory 78 The Memory Process S3 Abstract Ideas 85 VIII. ATTENTION The Nature of Reality 88 Our Relationship to Reality 89 Nature of Attention 90 The Four Attention Processes ' 91 How to Secure Attention 97 How to Hold Attention 99 Application to Business 100 So-called Monotony in Work. 103 Individual Differences 104 ^Application to Selling 104 Experimental Investigations 106 IX. FEELING AND EMOTION Relation to Attention 109 The Nature of Feeling 109 The Nature of Self .. 110 IX Development of Personalities Ill Many Personalities in the Self 113 Laws of Feeling 115 Feelings Affecting Physical Well-Being 117 Complexity and Variety of Feelings .120 Organic Response to Feelings 123 Nature of Emotions 124 Aesthetic Feelings 125 The Feeling of Value 128 The Value of Pleasure in Work 130 Imagination 132 X. IMPULSE AND WILL The Complexity of the Will 135 The Unity of Mental and Physical Acts 137 Automatic Actions 139 Will-Actions 141 Abnormal Actions 142 Development of Will- Actions 143 Interplay of Automatic Actions and Will- Actions 146 7*4 Application of Principles in Business 147 XI. SUGGESTION Internal and External Sources of Ideas 150 Weakening Internal Resistance 152 Nature of Suggestibility 153 Hypnotism . ., 154 X. Practical Uses of Suggestion 156 \. Suggestion in Salesmanship 157 N Suggestion in Advertising 161 Self -Suggestions 162 XII. THE ACQUIREMENT OF ABILITIES Physical and Mental Unity 165 Learning by Repetition 166 Influence of Repetition on the Nervous System . 167 Conscious Effort Required in Repetition 169 Avoid Exceptions in Repetition 170 Repetition in Acquiring Different Habits Side by Side 171 Organization of Complex Habits 172 Reaching the End by Distinct Steps 174 Keeping the End in View 176 The Value of Standardization in Industry 178 : Contents XIII. THE OUTER CONDITIONS OP EFFICIENCY The Services of Psychology 181 Adaptation of Working Tools 182 Psychological Adaptation of Toola 183 Individual Adaptation 186 Rhythmical Action 186 Psycho-Muscular Adaptations 187 Motion Studies 188 A Proper Environment 190 XIV. THE INNER CONDITIONS OF EFFICIENCY Nature of the Inner Conditions 194 Effects of Alcohol 194 Other Stimulants 198 Fatigue 199 Rest Periods , 200 The Use of Rest Periods 201 Individual Reaction to Fatigue 202 Blood Circulation in Fatigue 203 Mental and Emotional Influences 205 Psychological Factors in Emotions 206 Practical Bearing 208 XV. VOCATIONAL FITNESS Misfits in Life 211 Vocational Bureaus 214 Psychology in Vocational Guidance 215 Psychology Required in Scientific Management . 216 XVI. INDIVIDUAL MENTAL TRAITS Importance of Correct Classification 219 Use of Popular Classifications 220 Classifications into Contrasting Tendencies. . . .222 Psychological Method of Determining Indi- vidual Traits 225 Practical Hindrances to Complete Measure- ment 226 Inherited Dispositions 227 Inclusiveness of Individual Psychological Ex- aminations 231 The Three Basic Factors in Any Calling 231 Psychological Tests in All Three Directions 233 Contents xi XYII. SELECTION OF FIT INDIVIDUALS Kinds of Examinations 235 Group Psychology 236 Correlation Psychology 243 The Blackford Plan 250 Tests for Mental Traits 256 XVIII. MENTAL TESTS Testimonials and Certificates 259 Self-Observation 259 Observation of the Subjective Factors 262 Commercial Psychological Laboratories 263 Practical Tests 264 Actual Use of the Tests 278 Individual Efficiency 286 * 6 3 W BUSINESS PSYCHOLOGY PART ONE PRINCIPLES CHAPTER I BUSINESS AND PSYCHOLOGY CULTURAL PROGRESS In no direction has man progressed so much in the last two thousand years of civilization as in his commercial endeavors. We are too easily inclined to fancy that man- kind has changed and has made progress in every line, but that is certainly an illusion. No buildings have been built in the twentieth century so beautiful as those of the old Greeks, no dramas have been written so wonderful as those of their great poets, no philosophy has been thought so significant as that of the great Greek thinkers, and the statues chiseled two thousand years ago are still models for our generation. Our legal life is not superior to that of the old Eomans, nor are our state and city politics essentially different from those of olden times. Social intercourse has not changed much we have the same motives, the same hopes and fears, ambitions and jealousies. Man is the same in his family circle ; man is the same before his God. We are driven by hunger and desire for power, by love and reverence, like untold gen- erations before us. 1 2 Business Psychology SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY But in the economic life with its production of goods for practical use and their transportation and distribu- tion and the exchange of possessions the change is indeed a fundamental one. The modern factory and the modern credit system, the modern railway and steamer and cable are incomparable with the primitive methods of mankind or with anything which antiquity or mediaeval times or even recent centuries have produced. It seems as if we could nowhere measure the progress of the civilized human race more directly than in the glorious changes in commerce and industry. Every feature of the market and of production has been influenced by the wonderful inventions and discoveries and no less by the splendid achievements in new methods of exchange and organiza- tion. Harvesting machines have replaced the primitive tools of the past; electric wires spin a net of communi- cation over the lands of the world which are united by commerce and industry; powerful works of human in- vention dig the mines ; and in the factories operations are performed to which the highest scientific work of the physicist and chemist had to show the way. Yes, there seems to be no science in our universities which has not contributed to this victory of the practical desires of man over stubborn nature. The knowledge of mineralogists and botanists and zoologists, of mechanic- al engineers and electricians, of physiologists and chem- ists, has been brought into service. The co-operation of the whole world is so complete that we are no longer aware how many hundreds of thousands have to work with the most perfect instruments of modern transporta- tion and factory production to satisfy our needs. If we sit down to a meal and use the plate and the glass, the Business and Psychology 3 fork and the spoon and the napkin, and take the sugar and the pepper or what-not, we give no thought to those thousand-fold processes which were necessary to bring each of those products to the grasp of our hand. We take it for granted that the best machines have worked for us to weave the napkin and refine the sugar. All the knowledge of the century is thus made contribu- tory to the production and distribution of the economic goods of the world, and science is the real foundation on which the business of our time rests, however little the individual business man may be aware of the tremendous amount of intellectual work which was necessary for every forward step in practical life. He presses the elec- tric button at his desk to call the office boy or touches a switch to light the room ; he uses the telephone or sends a wireless message, and gives no moment's thought to the fact that numberless scholars in their laboratories had to devote their energies to the securing of these sim- ple effects. PSYCHOLOGY IN INDUSTRY In this situation of our present day in which everybody in the world of affairs, the captain of industry and the worst-paid workingman, the banker and his office boy, the merchant and the clerk, knowingly or unknowingly make the fullest use of the results of science, it is a strik- ing contrast to see how pitifully little use is made of that science which deals with the human mind. The science of the human mind, psychology, is today as solid, as scholarly, and as much worked out as the science of phys- ical and chemical nature ; and its field is surely no smaller, since the whole world of man's thinking and feeling and doing and remembering and attending and willing is involved. 4 Business Psychology But the progress of economic life has hardly been touched by the stream of knowledge which flows from this psychological source. The psychological expert is hardly heard of, while his older brothers, the electrical expert and the chemical expert, are much sought and respected everywhere. Yet we have only to look around us in the commercial and industrial spheres to discover quickly that after all the human mind plays the greatest role and deserves the most thorough study by everyone who would succeed in business life. It is certainly important to know the machines in the factory, and only when the machines are well cared for and well adjusted to their purpose can the manufacturer hope that his industrial output will be better than that of his rivals. But is the mind of the workingman not of equal, or rather, of higher importance in the work of the factory? How can we expect the best output if we are interested only in the purely technical side of the process and ignore the great and significant fact that a man with feelings and emotions, with ideas and impulses, with memory and attention, stands behind the machine and has to serve and has to master it? If his attention flags, if his mental fatigue interferes with his best work, if his interests carry him away, if he has not the right mental power to discriminate what he ought to discriminate, must not the work suffer even more than by an out-of- date machine? The business house may be installed with a splendid equipment, the department store may be a model estab- lishment, the banking house may have its special wires and the best adding machines; yet success and failure must depend upon the achievements of those who sit at the desks or who walk the floor or who stand behind the counter, and these achievements depend ultimately upon Business and Psychology 5 the mental powers of the employer and the employe. Their intellect and character, their talent and tempera- ment, are a thousand times more important and decisive than the splendor of the technical equipment. If the right men are in the right places and if the work is ad- justed to the mental conditions and mental demands, any difficulties can be overcome. On the other hand if the needs of the mind are neglected, if faulty minds are at work, if the service and output are not adjusted to the desires and feelings of the mind, the results will be de- plorable, however well the technical expert may have done his share. THE POWER OF THE MIND IN BUSINESS All business- is ultimately the affair of minds. It. starts from minds, it works through minds, it aims to serve minds. By industry and commerce and transpor- tation alike the demands of minds are to be satisfied. And every step needed for this satisfaction involves the attention, the thought, the ideas, the emotions, the in- stincts, the impulses of human minds. Is it not absurd to call the best-trained specialists for the supervision of those machines and yet to be satisfied with the most superficial, amateurish impressions when it comes to the judgment on that much more important factor in the play, the human mind? The manufacturer takes it for granted that the chemical process by which he dyes his wares must be judged by chemists. But whether the minds of his thousands of employes are in the right attitude, are prepared for the work, and are able to per- form it by their inborn make-up is left to the fancies of the foreman without ever consulting the psychologist who devotes his studies to such problems of the mind. It is as if a barrier separated the quiet, scholarly investiga- 6 Business Psychology tione of the student of the mind from the practical work of those whose success depends upon an understanding of the mind. We can hardly imagine that this would happen in any other field. As soon as the scholars have made their discoveries in the physical laboratory, these are at once carried into the market ; new machines are built and only the latest is welcome. But the faithful study of the mind is left to the psychological scholars, and the market, which is entirely dependent upon the working of the mind, remains untouched by such knowledge. Every- thing goes on as it did thousands of years ago. Every- body feels sure that he knows enough about the life of the human soul. Everybody behaves as if it were very difficult to understand the physics and chemistry of the commercial products, of the raw material, and of the machines, and as if it were important to gather all pos- sible expert knowledge, but at the same time everybody feels certain that he knows enough about the mind of the customer and the mind of the workingman, about the mind of the clerk and the mind of the advertisement reader, about the mind of the manufacturer and the mind of the salesgirl. Here too he shows not the slightest interest in drawing on the knowledge of the expert and making the fullest use of the scientific discoveries. This attitude must be fundamentally changed, and the last few years have brought a most promising beginning of such a change. Interest in the science of mental life has been awakened in the circles of commerce and in- dustry, various conditions have favored it, and not a few far-seeing business men and many ambitious young men recognize that the commercial success of the future will depend still more upon the mastery of mind than upon the mastery of matter. Man is more important Business and Psychology 7 than the machine, thoughts more valuable than equip- ment Personality is the biggest factor in business. How TO STUDY BUSINESS PSYCHOLOGY But it is sure that such better knowledge of the human mii:d as it enters into the market of the world cannot be supplied by a mere superficial gossiping about the mysteries of the mind. No one will have real technical control of nature who knows about natural science only anecdotes and curious little details. He must enter into a solid study of the natural facts which the scientists of the age have cleared up in their laboratories. It is not in the least different with the science of the mind. Today mere freak stories of queer mental happenings or uncanny reports of mental abnormities can never be a substitute for a thorough, detailed acquaintance with the laws of mental behavior. The man of affairs who wants to shape events in the sphere of the mind must have the energy to study the psychological science from its foun- dations. He must not ask at every step whether this bit of information can be of use at his desk in the office or in the factory. He must at first make himself ac- quainted with important facts without always keeping an eye on the practical application. In short, he must study psychology as if he had a pure interest in the understanding of the principles, just as an engineer must learn his mathematics without asking eagerly at every new equation whether he can make use of it in drawing his design. The student of psychology who has the interests of commerce and industry and of personal efficiency at the bottom of his mind must, of course, not be drawn into byways which may lead to other fields of life. But in those chief roads to the understanding of man he must 8 Business Psychology aim toward a thorough knowledge. The essential con- dition for all this is only that he be convinced that mod- ern psychology is really an exact, careful science, like the sciences of nature, and that this modern psychology has something of real value to offer to the man of prac- tical life. But let us not forget that there is no business psychol- ogy outside of the one great psychological science. Busi- ness psychology means a psychology in which the chief emphasis is laid on those mental functions which are significant for business life and in which so far as pos- sible the other aspects of psychology are omitted. If anyone were to try to present business psychology with- out going into the study of the foundations, principles, and laws of psychology in general, he would offer useless and misleading material. The business man would at first feel more at home, because he would hear talk about the matters of his daily concern, but at the end he would stand where he stood at the beginning. He would not see the real, deeper connections of the facts, and these alone can help him to go beyond the commonplaces of daily practice. Business: psychology is psychology, or it is nothing at all. Hence we shall not be afraid to discuss many points and principles which seem difficult. Only he who has the energy to master the theory can reach a point at which he sees his mental surroundings with a psychologizing eye. As soon as he succeeds in that, he can solve any special problem for himself and is made independent of any unscientific chance advice. The basic theory is in the end the most practical. Business and Psychology 9 i TEST QUESTIONS 1. Has the progress of civilization been uniform in all direc- tions ? 2. What has brought about the tremendous development in industrial progress during the last fifty years ? 3. Have you ever taken an inventory at the close of the day to see how many inventions and contributions from science served you in your activities of the day ? 4. How can psychology contribute to industrial progress? 5. Why has psychology been neglected in practical business affairs? 6. Have you ever observed work where the mechanical equip- ment seemed to be modern and complete, but where the psy- chological conditions for the work were most unfavorable ? CHAPTER H SCOPE AND METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY THE OLD v. THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY The psychology of a not far distant past had very little to present which could have promised help in ques- tions of industry and commerce, of production and trans- portation, of selling and buying, and in all which pertains to them. That psychology of old was first of all con- cerned with the nature of the human soul, its freedom, and its immortality. Great thinkers devoted themselves to such thoughts concerning the life of the soul, but the questions were approached from the point of view of the general philosopher. Their results were very valu- able and inspiring, just as the thoughts of the philoso- phers about God and the universe are of highest import. Yet it is clear that there is a great difference between a philosopher's speculating about the universe without and a physicist's sitting down in his workshop and ex- amining the special properties of the material things. He alone creates that detailed physical science which is sharply separated from the philosopher's ideas about the world. This same development occurred in the study of the inner life. Here too the old thoughts about the soul had an aim entirely different from that of the new work. Today the psychologist is not concerned with philo- sophical ideas about the soul, but he examines the facts of our inner experience and analyzes and describes them 10 Scope and Methods 11 with the same scientific calmness with which the natural- ists study chemicals. He finds that feelings and ideas and acts of will come and go in his inner life ; he under- stands that his neighbor also has such feelings and ideas and desires and impulses ; and now he simply asks from what elements they are composed, according to what laws they act, how they develop, and how they can be ex- plained. This is no longer the interest of the philosopher who moves in general ideas, but it is a very concrete, detailed examination of a material which is accessible to everyone. There is nobody who does not find such ideas, feelings, and will-acts in himself. Thus the modern psychologist lays all speculations aside and examines the facts. Only through this funda- mental change of attitude can he become useful for prac- tical purposes. Speculations about nature are not suf- ficient to build a machine, and speculations about the soul are not sufficient to prevent the overfatigue of a working- man, or to attract a customer to the window display, or to select the best-fitted man as salesman, or to develop the abilities of a bookkeeper. We must know the actual experiences and their connections with causes and effects. THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD This new trend of modern psychology did not begin suddenly, but the decisive time came when the psycholo- gists began to admit the method of experimenting; and this happened about forty years ago. The facts which were discussed in earlier times were gathered by chance observations. Indeed there are many mental facts re- corded in the psychological books of the old Greeks and Romans and through two thousand years in the scholarly books of many nations. But when those older authors wrote about memory or attention or feeling, they knew 12 Business Psychology these facts about the mind only through haphazard ex- periences, not as the result of scientific analysis. Everybody has gone through acts of remembering or attending, has been full of joy or grief, and therefore it seems as if everybody knew these contents of the mind and could describe them. But no naturalist would be satisfied if he were to describe the chemical constitution of salt and sugar only from his chance acquaintance with them at the dinner table. If he wants to find out what salt and sugar really are, he experiments with them, he resolves them, and mixes them with other material and analyzes them with his subtle instruments in the chemical laboratory. All the triumphs of modern science have been dependent upon this method of experimenting. Only he who experiments can vary the course of events and can influence it so that he may study how a change of con- ditions produces a change of effects. The psychologists recognized that this method alone could lead the study of the mind also to the height which the natural sciences had reached. They too, therefore, began to make themselves independent of chance ex- periences. They did not wish to wait until salt and sugar appeared on the dinner table of life ; they did not wish to wait until they had to remember or to attend a thing, until they had to feel joy or sadness, until they accidentally heard tones and saw colors, formed thoughts and volitions ; but they called up the mental functions for the purpose of scientific analysis. If the aim is to study memory, the modern experi- menter does not simply think about how his memory acted on a certain occasion. He takes a set of words or figures or syllables and studies how often he must repeat them before his memory holds them, what the influence of pauses is, what the influence of rhythmical speaking Scope and Methods 13 is, how much is left after ten minutes, how much after an hour, how much the success depends upon the seeing or upon the hearing of those words or the seeing and hear- ing of them together, how much depends upon the direc- tion of the attention during the learning process, and a hundred other experimental problems. As soon as the question is formulated in this way he can gain exact results ; he is free from all vague specula- tion. He can demonstrate by definite figures that this method of learning is good and that that method is poor, that this scheme improves the memory, and that that way simplifies the learning. The experimental method de- manded special workshops, and it is not more than thirty- five years since the first laboratory of this kind was founded. But the movement has made rapid progress. Today such laboratories for experimental study of the mind are used in every civilized country and more than a hundred are established in the United States alone. A visit to a psychological institute would hardly sug- gest to the casual guest that it has anything to do with the mind. Our Harvard laboratory has not less than forty rooms. The electric wires bring different currents to every wall. Large instrument cases recall the appa- ratus of a physical laboratory. A big workshop with its lathe for metal work in which a mechanic is busy from morning to night provides the students with the newest equipment for special researches. Eight rooms are en- tirely black so that no light may be reflected from their surface; one room is sound-proof. In some, very subtle instruments are installed to measure the shortest time intervals with the exactitude of a thousandth of a second ; in others, very complicated arrangements allow the 14 Business Psychology worker to take a record of the smallest changes in pulse or breathing, in muscle contractions or in the flowing of the blood to the arm. In short, everything suggests interest in bodily material processes, and nothing betrays tho predominant activity of this scientific institute, the study of the mind. OBJECT OP EXPERIMENTS Yet such an impression would be entirely misleading. Not one of the questions raised here deals with the body as such. Everything has ultimate reference to the inner life, to the conscious experience. Measuring the time intervals in thousandths of a second is for us only a means to measure the length of a mental act. We want to know how long it takes to understand an idea or to connect two thoughts or to discriminate two colors or to perform a will-act. Again when we study the heart-beat or the respiration or the activities of the glands or of the muscles, we care for them only because they are the expressions of our inner emotions, of our joys and sur- prises and angers and fears. If we use our dark rooms and sound-proof rooms, it is not because we make investi- gations concerning the lights or sounds in the outer world, but because we want to understand the color sen- sations and the tone sensations which we find in our minds and from which we must build up the complex sense experiences in our consciousness. Not the color and the tone, but the seeing of the colors and the hearing of the tones is our problem ; not the movements which we perform, but the will to perform them and the attention directed to them are what we investigate in a psycho- logical laboratory. But the chief feature is that these physical instruments allow us to produce those mental states whenever we need This picture, along with a few others found in this volume, illustrates some of the most familiar instruments used in our psychological laboratories. On the left side of the table stands a chronoscope, the standard instrument for measuring mental processes in thousandths of a second. The lower larger dial of this chronoscope indicates the whole seconds and the tenths of a second, the upper smaller dial the hundredths and the thousandths of a second. The pointers go as long as an electric current passes through the chronoscope. In the experiment shown here the electric current is closed at the moment when the apparatus in the center of the table exposes a word, and it is opened when the experimenter speaks, as the movements of his lips break the electric current. The chronoscope shows the time from the seeing of the word to the reacting by the speech movement. Reaction time measurements and their practical application are explained later in the text. Scope and Methods 15 them for our observations. We do not know any function of the mind which cannot be brought under such experi- mental observation. At the threshold of the work a gen- eration ago only very simple problems were carried into the laboratory, especially those of sensations and im- pulses. But every year opened new vistas. Today even the finest shades of inner life, the subtlest thoughts, and richest feelings can be approached by the experimental method. Much which a few years ago seemed still inac- cessible has been conquered by the new laboratory schemes. ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE While the introduction of the experiment has secured the means of mastering the processes of the human mind, the newer development of psychology has profited no less from an expansion in other ways. The visitors in our Harvard laboratory will find not a few rooms with cages and vivariums and tanks. Eingdoves can be heard and turtles seen. Yes, animals as low as the earthworm and as high as the monkey are studied in our animal depart- ment. Here too it is the mental aspect which interests us, the intelligence of the birds or reptiles or mammals, their memory-power, their achievement of attention, their emotions, their decisions to move hither or thither. The time has long passed when the story of the animal's mind was based on the gossip of the hunter or on curious ex- periences with ants and bees. Experiment has taken con- trol of the whole field. Everything is carefully measured and through comparison of these mental functions in the beasts new light is thrown on the working of the human mind. 16 Business Psychology ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY We can go still further. The aim to compare vari- ous forms of minds is not confined to contrasting the ani- mal mind with the human mind. Among the human beings we may compare the undeveloped with the de- veloped, the child with the adult, or, what is still more important, the normal with the abnormal. In both di- rections psychologists have found many new avenues of research. With careful experiments the development of the child has been traced from the first minutes of his life, from the first vague sensations when he tastes sweet milk, through all the stages of nursery and school life and all the phases of growing intelligence and tempera- ment and character. The study of the mental diseases and of all the borderland regions between mental health and mental illness has been not the smallest triumph of modern psychology. We know today that the abnormal disturbances of the mind can be understood only by an exact comparison with the ordinary functions of the per- sonality. The work of the physician has therefore been brought into the neighborhood of routine psychology, and thus has added much to the large field of mental studies. PSYCHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM Only one region is avoided by the scientific psycholo- gist, that which the public easily takes as the chief psychological topic, namely, the mystical states of the mind. The newspaper reader hears about telepathy and clairvoyance, about spiritualism and automatic writing, and fancies that such mysterious and uncanny products of the soul furnish the most interesting material for psychological studies. This is a complete delusion. The scientific psychologist knows that there is a sharp demar- Scope and Methods 17 cation line between science and mysticism. Whoever approaches spiritualistic seances and the performances of mediums in a religious attitude is perfectly free to do so. That is a private concern of his personal conscience and of his religious faith. But whoever accepts such ghosts ' returning to earth or such supernatural communi- cations from distant souls as actual facts leaves the realm of science and finds himself in the world of miracles. In the true psychology of our day there is nothing mysterious, and even those processes which have some surprising and easily mystifying character, like hypno- tism, are entirely brought under scientific control and can be explained like other natural occurrences. They belong to that group of mental phenomena which, to- gether with dreams and neu'rasthenic and hysteric aberra- tions, lie in the great and highly interesting sphere which is between the normal waking mind and the disturbances of disease. TEST QUESTIONS 1. How does modern psychology differ from philosophy? 2. How does experimental psychology proceed to discover truth? 3. What are some of the mental factors that can be separated for exact psychological analysis? 4. How can physical instruments be used in experiments upon the mindt 5. What is the distinction between normal and abnormal psychology? 6. What has psychology to say about mysticism ? 7. Can hypnotism be explained by modern psychology ? CHAPTER HI THE APPLICATION OF PSYCHOLOGY PREVAILING PREJUDICE AGAINST APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY The man of affairs may listen to a report on the wide scope and the brilliant development of experimental methods in modern psychological science, and yet may have a lingering doubt whether it can be worth while for him to approach such studies. Of course, as a man of culture and education, he may glance over the results of that new science with the same interest with which he may follow the reports from other fields of human en- deavor, from astronomy or geology, from Assyrian his- tory, or from the sociology of the South African tribes. But however entertaining it may be to hear from the psychologist about the laws which control the human mind and about the mechanism of emotions and volitions, he looks skeptically into such new-fashioned books on the mind, because he has his serious doubts whether they can really serve the demands of practical life. He is will- ing to grant that he comes in contact with human minds at every step of his business life and that it might be a great gain for him if he could have full insight into the minds of his clerks or his workingmen or his customers. But to get some scientific formula seems very far distant from the practical business of the day. He has the instinctive feeling that his experienced traveling sales- man knows much more about the mind of his customers than the most scholarly psychologist, and that his ex- 18 Application 19 perienced foreman in the factory knows better whom to employ than anyone who comes with a proposal to ex- amine the candidates by scientific psychological tests. Yet may this not be a very superficial prejudice? To be sure, we trust our cook to know best how our food ought to be prepared and how to select the food. Yet have we a right to doubt that the scientific chemist and physician can determine much better the nutritive value of every element of our food and can prescribe, especially if our health is a little impaired, which diet would be the best for us and how the prescribed food ought to be pre- pared for our table? Moreover no psychologist would advise anyone to discard the traditions and experience of those who have stood a long while in the midst of their commercial or industrial undertaking. And even the so- called instinct of the old employe may be trusted, how- ever often it may mislead him. The farmer may well rely on his instinctive knowledge of how the weather will change; and yet he would be dangerously old-fash- ioned if he were to disregard entirely the scientific meteorological reports of the weather bureau. And all his traditions concerning the treatment of the soil cannot help him so much as a scientific understanding of that which the agricultural chemists are ready to teach him. We live in the day of the scientist and the expert, and he who closes his ears to their advice will never dig the finest potatoes from his acre. APPLICATION IN THE SCHOOLS In other regions of practical life this prejudice against psychological advice has happily disappeared. The school man, the physician, even the lawyer and the artist, have found out that these discoveries of the modern psy- chologist are not simply dry text-book knowledge and 20 Business Psychology that the output of his laboratory is not serving only as material for general culture. They are wide-awake and are fully aware that the most useful and most helpful knowledge streams from this source. How could it be otherwise? Must not every school- teacher in every class-room in every lesson devote herself to the mind of the pupil T She has no right to give to the child a lesson to learn which is not in harmony with the pupil's intelligence, or which makes too great demands on his memory, or which imposes too great a strain on his attention, or which causes too great mental fatigue. She has to consider the mental differences of the children and the whole rhythm of their mental activity ; she must know how their ideas are linked, how their attention can be captured, how their distraction can be overcome, how their good-will can be stirred up, how their ambition must be directed, how their laziness can be overcome. She must take care that the words on the blackboard or the lines on the map produce clear images in the minds of the children, that the words which she speaks are rightly understood, that the lessons are not too long or too short, that the recess brings the right recreation to the mind, and that the training in the ability to read and write and calculate is proceeding in the order in which the mind makes the greatest progress. In short, from the nursery to graduation the mind of the youth must be understood in all its subtlest details if education is to fulfill its ideals. Dissatisfaction with the schools was so widespread and the teachers themselves felt so strongly that their success in spite of their best efforts was too often crippled by poor adjustment of the work to the minds of the chil- dren that a great movement toward psychology has set in all over the country. Pedagogy and psychology have Application 21 become most intimately connected, and every teacher is nowadays expected to be familiar with the results of ex- perimental and physiological psychology in the interest of a sound school life. APPLICATION IN MEDICINE It is not different with the physicians. Every man to whom the health of the community is entrusted knows today what too few knew yesterday, that the patient's mind is a most essential factor in every disease. The curing process is in every bodily disturbance strongly in- fluenced by the nervous system, and the nervous system is deeply influenced by the mind. The importance of this role of the mind is greatest, of course, when the nervous system itself is the seat of the trouble. The numberless forms of nervous disturbance, from the slightest neuras- thenia to the severest forms of brain diseases, can never be treated completely without a very careful considera- tion of the mental factors. Only the true science of the mind can furnish such knowledge. The physician today, and not only the physician of mental diseases but every doctor who cures nervous states, therefore makes the fullest use of the subtle methods which experimental psy- chology has introduced. He needs mental laboratory tests to discriminate early the different forms of nervous disturbances and to examine the progress of the various states of treatment. APPLICATION IN LAW Even the lawyer is today no longer unfamiliar with the offerings of the psychologist. He cannot possibly forget that the witness and the criminal, the judge and the jury, are human minds, the working of which is de- cisive for the fulfillment of his purposes. He knows that 22 Business Psychology the witness may have the best will to bring out the truth and yet that his reports under oath may be deeply influ- enced by the limitations of mental perception and memory and attention and feeling. He must determine there- fore what abilities and special mental features a witness has. If his visual memory is strong, he may be trusted in the report about what he saw, but may be entirely unreliable when he reports what he heard. Psycho- logical tests can bring out hundreds of such characteristic traits. Again the psychologist has methods to bring to light that which the criminal or the witness intentionally sup- presses and hides. Or the psychologist may show the mental effects of various forms of punishment or may help the lawyer in influencing the jurymen or may demon- strate the weakness of the methods of the third degree. The influence of the oath on the memory and attention of the witness, the influence of fear and excitement on the criminal, the mental conditions which lead to a crime, and many similar legally important factors win entirely new character in the light of exact study of the mind. WIDER APPLICATION TO LIFE In short the school and the hospital and to a certain degree the court-room show an abundance of cases in which scientific psychology can be and has been applied to the practical affairs of everyday life. Teachers, physi- cians, and even lawyers have no right to ignore the help which psychology can bring. The modern psychological knowledge does not lie in the treasure-houses of science as gold bullion, but much of it has been coined and can be used in the intercourse of the street. Even the students of art or of the theatre or of music have the greatest in- terest to consider the methods by which the beautiful ef- Application 23 fects are to be produced. They are somehow to capture the mind, and each element must therefore be examined from a psychological point of view. The same is true for the scientist and for the scholar. When the astronomer observes the stars, he must know how his mind works. Many kinds of illusions enter into the impressions from the outer world. It is important to recognize their sources in the mind. If the historian relies on the reports of witnesses and tells what others see in peace and war he must be able to estimate the truth of such reports and can do so only if he understands the minds of such chroniclers. Thus we see psychological knowledge made serviceable for very different human enterprises. Everywhere it has brought ample success. Have we a right artificially to keep it away from the gigantic field of economic endeav- ors, from commerce and industry? May we not hope that it will have here the same splendid development that it has had in education and medicine! The teachers and physicians and still more the lawyers originally had the same suspicion of psychology and its practical applicability as the commercial and industrial workers have today. This suspicion, mostly based on in- sufficient acquaintance with the field, will fade away in economics just as quickly as in pedagogy and in pathol- ogy. What is needed here, as in those other fields, is only that real co-operation be established. The true prog- ress of applied psychology in the school life began only when the teachers did not simply wait until the psy- chologists had completed the work but when the psycholo- gists and teachers joined hands. The teachers had to offer their problems out of the midst of school life and had to work them out under the guidance of the psycholo- 24 Business Psychology gists with psychological methods. The physicians did the same. Unselfish co-operation produces results. APPLICATION TO BUSINESS The business men must come forward with similar confidence. The actual problems of store and factory and office must be turned over to the psychologist. On the other hand the psychologist would be guilty of mis- leading the business man if he promised him miracles. The progress must be slow and disappointments are never impossible. The psychologist has no ready-made prescriptions for turning poor business into sudden pros- perity or for filling every place with the ideally adapted man only. The application of psychology to the concerns of commerce and industry is the latest chapter of ap- plied psychology, and therefore shows more than others the traits of youth. But also from this point of view it may be said that the progress will be the safer and the mastery will be the surer the more we have the patience to study the practical problems on a solid foundation of a real understanding of the whole mind. There is no short cut which leads directly to the facts of applied psychology. We must always first understand the gen- eral standards of the mind and the regular behavior. In other words we cannot avoid studying general psychology before we try to make use of it for the special purposes of the market It cannot be denied that the so-called psychological literature on business proceeds in a very different way. There are many books on selling or on business admin- istration or on shop management or on industrial work which are excellent as far as the technical and economic and mechanical points are concerned. But wherever they approach the mental life they do not really speak the Application 25 language of science but the language of the street and of the newspaper, and so open a gulf between the popular information which they furnish and the scientific under- standing of the processes which the psychologist tries to supply. The different language is only a symbol of the different thought. All the conceptions with which such popular business books and business magazines work belong in a sphere of ideas which cannot possibly lead to any deeper understanding. They refer to the surface view. They never enable us to explain the processes from their real causes and to recognize the underlying laws. They condense, if they are well prepared, the ad- vice of experienced business men. They are just as useful as the hundreds of medical prescriptions which we read in the health corners of the Sunday newspapers. Such prescriptions may be entirely correct and he who acts according to their rules may be better able to fight a cold or to get rid of rheumatism than his neighbor. But to pick up a few such ready-made rules is hardly to be compared even with a beginner's study of the elements of medicine based on an insight into the structure and the functions of the normal and of the diseased organism. Only he who understands such principles of scientific medicine knows where those pre- scriptions are in order. He who relies on such surface cures for single symptoms may just as well apply tomor- row a prescription where it does not fit the case at all. The true source of the pain may be entirely misunder- stood and an outside resemblance of chance symptoms may lead to a treatment which is ruinous. Really to understand mental conditions in business means to understand the structure and function of the mind. As soon as the lasting principles of mental life are grasped, the special rules become clear as their con- 26 Business Psychology sequences. Only where such a connection with an under- lying thorough understanding of mental life exists have we a right to speak of a psychological treatment of busi- ness questions. The common-sense talk about the mind which fills many of our business books is not psychology and can never be real psychology. It is easy to use one's mind ; every child does that. But it is difficult to under- stand it. TEST QUESTIONS 1. Up to this point in your life have you had a prejudice against practical psychology ? Have you been indifferent ? 2. How is psychology applied in our modern schools ? 3. What are some of the psychological methods used by a modern physician t 4. How can a lawyer make use of psychology ? 5. Why should the artist be familiar with the laws of psy- chology ? 6. Why should the business man and the capable psychologist often join hands in solving business problems ? 7. What is the nature of much of the popular writing on busi- ness psychology? Have you followed any such advice? CHAPTER TV THE MIND AND THE BODY THE MATERIAL FOB PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY What is the material which the psychologist is really studying? The astronomer studies the stars and their movements, the botanist studies the plants and their growth. Everybody easily understands what their fields of work are. It is also simple to see what the historian or the student of languages or the mathematician or the economist has to study. But when we ask ourselves what the student of the mind is really to investigate we find difficulties. Let us turn to our practical interest. We want to know the mind of the customer who enters the store. Only if we know his mind can we be sure to please him, to satisfy his wishes, to draw his attention to the goods which we offer, and to convince him that it is to his advantage to make the purchase. Or we want to know the mind of the young man who is to be appointed as clerk in the office. Will he be a faith- ful worker I Will he not be careless? Will he have a good memory for the names and the details which come up in business? Will he be honest? Will he devote him- self to the interests of the firm? Will he waste his money or will he be saving? Will he be intelligent when respon- sibilities fall on him? Will he be hasty in his decisions? Or we want to know the mind of the workingman who has to feed the machine in the factory. Will the work 27 28 Business Psychology fatigue him so that his fatigue makes him liable to care- lessness and, through that, to accident! Has he the mental ability to look out for all the details of the me- chanical work? Can he follow the speedy rhythm of the machine? Will the monotony of the work disturb him? Will he know how to help himself in a difficulty? Or we want to know the mind of the traveling salesman. Will he have the power of suggestion which wins the cus- tomer? Will he spread the right atmosphere of con- fidence? Will he be industrious and loyal? Will he understand the needs of the retailer with whom he deals ? Will he be discreet? Will he be temperate? Will he be quarrelsome? Or we want to know the mind of the banker to whom we trust our deposits. We even want to know the mind of the passer-by on the street who sees our window display or reads the poster with our advertisement. Will his mind react favorably upon our announcement? Will he like that picture? Will he feel ready to yield to our ap- peal? What is going on in his mind or in anyone's mind with whom we have any commercial or industrial or technical or financial dealing? There is no end to such questions, but what is really meant by all of them? What is that peculiar object of our inquiry? THE INDIVIDUAL'S CONSCIOUSNESS We surely do not ask about the soul of all those people from the workingman to the banker, from the advertise- ment reader to the floorwalker. By the word "soul," mankind has always understood that deepest core of the personality which is itself not accessible to any inner ob- servation but which we grasp in our moral and religious thought. Our interest is entirely different. We want to know the actual experiences; we want to know that Mind and Body 29 which really happens and which can really be traced and observed in the individuals. Not the soul of the clerk or of the customer, but his positive ideas, feelings, memo- ries, desires, and volitions are our concern. Yet, even if we agree on that, there may still be a diffi- culty in finding our material, because we can look on all these feelings and memories in two very different ways. We may ask, first, what the men themselves really ex- perience. Their memory-images or their feelings of fatigue or of monotony, their desires and their decisions, are then the true material for our psychological interest. Of course, we cannot directly become aware of them. We cannot look into the customer's mind and perceive there his joy in our showcase or his dissatisfaction with our price. This joy and this dissatisfaction are emotions in him which no one but he himself can feel and therefore of which no one but he himself can be aware. If we want to make clear to ourselves how his joy or his anger feels we can do nothing but remember when we ourselves were joyful or angry. And, if a workingman is fatigued, his feeling of fatigue can never be something which we can grasp directly. He finds that fatigue in his conscious- ness, and if we have never felt fatigued we cannot know how it feels, just as a blind man can never know how it feels to see red or green. Everyone has his content of consciousness quite for himself. No one can break into another man's mind and lay hands on any of his mental possessions. His memory- images are his own. I may remember the same incident which my neighbor remembers, but his memory-idea and my memory-idea are two entirely different contents of mind, in spite of the fact that they refer to the same event. We can never exchange them. He cannot feel my memory-image or I, his. And if I want to con- 30 Business Psychology sider the characteristics of his experience of remembering I can do it only because I know from my own experiences how such a memory-act feels. We might say therefore that all our interests in the mental life of those people in store and factory and count- ing house refer to those inner states which everyone can experience only for himself. Our psychological study is to analyze those states and to trace their laws and to make us understand what we have to expect in every situation from the conscious developments. The study of the mind becomes in this way a study of the contents of consciousness. Everything which is not really felt by someone or which has not an immediate influence on somebody's inner experiences lies outside of our feeling. The mind is that of which individuals become aware as their inner experience. CONSCIOUSNESS REVEALED BY BEHAVIOB But now we may take an entirely different point of view. We said that the customer in the store interests us as psychologists because we want to discover what his likes and dislikes are, what his preferences and decisions are, what his turn of attention and his liability to sugges- tion are. What does all this mean but the customer's turning to this or to that thing on the counter, taking up the one and throwing aside the other, choosing and pay- ing for the one and never inspecting the other? And if we are interested in the workingman's mind, what does his fatigue mean but his decrease in efficient work, his do- ing it slowly and carelessly? What does his eagerness mean but his doing the work with unusual persistence? What does his intelligence mean but his ability to per- form those movements and actions which are best fitted Mind and Body 31 for the particular situation? This is exactly the case everywhere. Actions reveal the inner life. We are interested in the mind, and yet all which is really important for us is the man's kind of action and his outer behavior, his speaking and handling and turn- ing and moving, in short, processes which we can per- ceive from without. We want to know whether the clerk's mind is honest, but that means to us after all only whether he will make correct entries in the ledger or not, whether he will take money out of the cash drawer or not, whether he will speak true words or untrue ones. Yet every one of these actions can be seen or neard or otherwise found out from the happenings in the outer physical world. We can generalize this. If we have a practical interest in any man's mind, the truly important factor is the man's way of action, his outer behavior, that is, the chain of processes which go on in his body. All his actions indeed are evidently bodily events. His spoken words are movements of his lips and tongue and vocal cord. His eager work is a chain of movements of his arms and fingers and legs, and even his taking money out of the cash drawer is a bodily process. To be sure, if all these bodily actions in speaking and reading, feeding the ma- chine or selling over the counter, entering the shop and paying for the goods, were simply physical processes of the body, like the action of the heart or of the stomach, the behavior of the individuals could not be called mental at all. We take it for granted that the turning of the cus- tomer to the one box and away from the other is felt by him in his consciousness as an inner experience of liking and desiring the one and of disliking and avoiding the other. But for practical purposes it makes no difference 32 Business Psychology whether we take the trouble to awake in him the mental liking for our goods or whether we stir up in him the physical impulse to turn to our goods. His outer be- havior and his inner experience then appear to us as merely two different expressions of the same event. The consciousness and the body with its actions are two dif- ferent aspects of that reality which we want to study as practical psychologists. Hence "mind" means for us both that which everyone finds in himself, in his inner private consciousness, in which nobody else can directly take part, and at the same time the particular kind of bodily behavior in which the personality expresses itself and which is open to everyone's perception. Thus the mind which is aware of its feelings and the body which shows a certain behavior in contact with the world cannot be separated in our psychological, practical interests. Whenever the mind is influenced the behavior changes and whenever the behavior shows characteristic traits we refer them to the mind of the personality. THE PERCEPTIONS This intimate relation of mind and body has been the object of very thorough study. The chief topics of such study have been first of all the perceptions, that is, the processes of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touch- ing the outer world. Whenever we become aware of the display in a shop window, the visual impression of the gowns can arise in our mind only if their colors, that is, the light rays, stimulate our eye. If we close our eyelids the perception of the beautiful display disappears. We can now examine in detail the processes by which those colors behind the window glass influence the apparatus in our eye, and how the excitations from the sensitive parts of the eye are carried on to our brain and produce Mind and Body 33 there the vivid impressions. The details of our sense- impressions form nowadays a whole science, and every bit of it is the story of contact between body and mind. WILL-ACTIONS While in the perceptions the process begins with the bodily excitation of the sense organs and ends with the impressions in the mind, the order of events is the oppo- site in our will-actions. Here we first become aware of our desire or wish or will as something in our conscious- ness, but we enter into a real will-action when this will- impulse is linked with a movement of the body. "We want to see what time it is, and while we become aware of this wish our hand grasps for our watch. The events pro- ceed here from the inside to the outside, but here too, as in the perceptions, mind and body interest us together. The detailed study traces the exact ways in which the will-excitement is carried from the brain to the muscles. THE UNITY OF BODILY AND MENTAL LIFE The intimate relation between mind and body presents itself not only when the sense organs stimulate the mind or when the mind works on the muscles. In a still more interesting way the scientist finds their unity in the whole character and rhythm of our inner life. Everybody knows how the whole mental life is changed in the dreams of our sleep. The sleep is a bodily state which the chem- ical products of fatigue produce by poisoning the nervous substances. As soon as this process of the brain cells occurs we find the whole mental life completely reversed by the fantasy of our dreams. In a similar way any chemical substances which we introduce into our blood by way of our stomach may have strong mental effects as soon as they reach the brain. 34 Business Psychology If a large amount of alcohol is absorbed by the body, the mental life may be deeply altered during the period of the intoxication. Ideas rush through the mind, the usual prudence is forsaken, the emotions take the char- acter of exaggerated hilarity, while impulses arise which ordinarily are suppressed. The purely bodily change thus involves a strong mental change too. Even a cup of tea may make the mind more social; hashish may bring raptures of delight; other drugs cause a mental depres- sion; again others interfere with the memory. Ordinary fatigue, long before sleep sets in, also has its bodily con- sequences, and yet they may be noticed first of all in the decrease of mental activity. The facts become still more striking in cases of dis- ease. Any disease in certain parts of the brain is ac- companied by mental disturbances. If the brain cannot develop normally, the child's mind remains idiotic. If the brain degenerates, a paralysis of the mental function sets in. The more the microscopical study of brain defects progresses, the more we understand the subtle connec- tions between particular bodily disturbances and par- ticular mental abnormalities. If by the breaking of an artery the blood destroys certain rear parts of the brain, the patient becomes blind. If the destruction reaches other brain parts, he may become deaf. Again there are definite regions in the brain which are so intimately linked with the mental process of speaking that their lesion involves the loss of speech. The development of the brain from birth to adolescence corresponds to the steady development of the mental functions. In short the modern scientist can bring together material from many different quarters to prove that normal and ab- normal happenings in the body are exactly corresponding to changes in the inner mental experience. Mind and Body 35 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN These last illustrations, however, already suggest that we have no right to speak of body in general, but that we must refer to a special organ, namely, the brain. The mental events run parallel to the brain processes. As soon as the brain processes are repeated, the parallel mental processes are repeated too, or we may also formu- late it in this way: Every change in the mental experi- ence corresponds to a change in the brain processes. These brain processes are the physical causes of the be- havior of man. Whatever man is doing is done by muscle action, and these muscle actions are caused by the fore- going brain processes. This is the reason why it makes hardly any difference for our practical purposes whether we speak about the mental experiences of a man or about his bodily behavior. The bodily behavior is only the effect of his brain changes, and those brain changes always go together with his mental experience. How is it possible for the brain to perform this ex- tremely complex work of controlling man's entire be- havior? To come nearer to this problem we may look on the brain for a moment without any reference to the mind and ask ourselves what the brain is, purely as an organ of the body. The answer is this : The brain is an organ which intermediates between the sense organs and the muscles. The brain is connected with the sense organs by the sensory nerves and with the muscles by the motor nerves. The sense organs are not only the eye and the ear and the tongue and the nose, but also the whole skin and the fine organs which lie in the inner parts of our body and which receive their messages from our inner body. These sen- sory nerves either reach the brain directly or pass at first 36 Business Psychology through the spinal cord, the prolongation of the brain through the whole back. In the same way the motor nerves go either directly from the brain to the muscles of the head or they pass from the brain through the spinal cord to the muscles of the limbs and of the trunk. Millions of excitations are carried from our sense organs to our brain and millions of impulses are sent from our brain to the muscles of the organism. It is the brain which is the great central switchboard connecting the right sense-impressions with the right motor re- sponses. Those sense-impressions represent the outer world; those muscle contractions are actions of the per- sonality; the brain has to take care that the actions are well adjusted to the surrounding world. How can this be achieved? It would surely be impos- sible to understand it if we think of the brain as one sim- ple organ, but the metaphor which we used when we called it a central switchboard brings us nearer to the understanding. In a telephone system like that of the city of New York the wires from hundreds of thousands of transmitting instruments lead to the central office and from the central office the wires lead to hundreds of thou- sands of receivers. The central station secures the con- nections between the right transmitter and the right receiver. In the brain we have nerve fibers instead of wires and in every brain the number of these nerve fibers which connect various parts of the central apparatus is a thousand times greater than that of the connections in New York. But in principle it too is a system of con- necting paths of tremendous complexity. THE NEURONS The element of the whole system is an apparatus called the "neuron." It consists of three characteristic parts, Mind and Body 37 a central part, the so-called cell body, visible only under the microscope, and two arms which branch off from this cell body in opposite directions. The cell body is a little lump of living substance which may have the form of a ball or of a pyramid or it may be similar to a star. The two branches are very different from each other. The one is usually short but it is formed like a bush with a thousand twigs. The other may be short or long, but it has few side arms and ends in a fine brush of fibers. Two neurons never grow into each other, but they touch each other. The endings of the long arm of the one clasp into the endings of the short arm of the next, and where they come in contact the excitation can go over from the one to the other. The short branch receives and the long branch sends the message, but it always goes through that little central body. Now about a billion such neurons stand in connection with one another. Some millions form the sensory nerves, some millions the motor nerves, but by far the largest number intermediates between the sensory and the motor neurons. Those parts of the brain and the spinal cord in which the cell bodies are clustered together appear to the naked eye as grey substance and those parts which are essentially made up from the branches appear to the naked eye white. In the spinal cord the grey sub- stance is in the center surrounded by white substance. In the brain the chief region of the grey is the outer layer, while the inner parts of the brain are many con- necting fibers. That outer layer, the so-called ' ' cortex ' ' of the brain, contains the chief end stations for all the sen- sory paths and the chief starting stations for all the mo- tor paths. If a stimulus reaches such a sensory center, for instance, if we hear a cry, this may irradiate from that sensory center in the cortex to hundreds of thou- 38 Business Psychology sands of other neurons which finally lead to those motor centers by which the impulse is given to listen or to run away. THE PHYSICAL, BASIS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR The foregoing brief description of the brain and the nervous system contains valuable suggestions for our practical problem. The growth of the nervous system is clearly a problem of developing a network of paths which create a useful connection between the senses and the muscles. The more highly the nervous system is organized, the more possibilities there are for making such connections. Man's nervous system is, of course, the climax. This understanding of the real relation of nerve connections to human behavior enables the psy- chologist to suggest practical methods of training for bodily and mental efficiency. In this connection one more fact should be noted. The higher the nervous system stands in the scale, the more it is able to produce actions in response to such things in the surroundings as are not immediately exciting the senses but which were parts of earlier experiences. The animal smells a scent; this scent awakes in the nervous system that excitement which at an earlier experience was connected with that particular smell and the sight of a prey or of an enemy, and now the smell and the after- effect of that earlier sight together stir up the action of attack or escape. The more richly the nervous system is developed, the larger is the possibility of such after- effects from previous impressions. In man the actual impressions of the moment are only a small fraction of the excitements in the brain which lead to action. The far larger part consists of the after-effects from that which had reached the brain be- Mind and Body 39 fore. The trillions of excitations which have come to our brain from the first days of our life, the lights and sounds which we have seen and heard, including the words which we have read and to which we have listened, all have their after-effects on our nervous system and work together to make us respond by this or that action of our hands or lips. Thus the scientist considers this whole mechanism of behavior as a quite explainable nat- ural apparatus. But he understands, of course, that the mental process is much more than the mere physical re- action, inasmuch as all these brain processes which link the impressions with the actions are accompanied by the inner experiences. THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM If we want to describe simply the inner experiences, the actual feelings and emotions and ideas and volitions, we must rely entirely on our consciousness and analyze what we find in ourselves. But if we want to explain the succession of events, we must turn to these brain proc- esses in the body. The one cannot be separated from the other. They are two aspects of the same experience. The customer, the workingman, the salesman, the clerk, the banker, the advertisement readers, and all the rest are minds which have a special content of consciousness, but they are at the same time brains which produce a cer- tain kind of behavior. If we were to consider only the mental act and were to describe its elements, we should leave out the physical action and yet these outer actions are practically the most important part of the process for us. On the other hand if we were to consider only the ac- tions and their brain causes, that is, if we were to confine ourselves to the physical side, we should omit that which 40 Business Psychology makes those men really human for us and which gives meaning to their experience. Hence we must always consider mind and body together. We must analyze the mental states as they are perceived and felt and desired, and we must at the same time understand them as accom- paniments of brain processes which form the connecting link between the sense-impressions and the actions. The detailed study of the essential mind-acts must therefore begin with those experiences which result from the sense-impressions and must end with those through which the outer actions are brought forth, and between these two ends, that is, between perception and mil- activity, must lie the study of all those mental states which correspond to those linking processes in the brain, the memories, ideas, and thoughts, the acts of attention and feeling and emotion, of suggestion and imagination and desire. This will be the order of our analysis. THE THBEE GREAT FACTORS OF THE MIND The perceptions stand in the nearest relation to the memory-ideas and to the thoughts. They all form parts of our knowledge concerning the world. We may group them together as a unit, and in the same way we may combine all the other mental functions into two other groups, the one containing everything which refers to the personal attitude, and the other everything concern- ing the impulse to action. Man 's knowledge of the world, man's interest in the world, and man's action toward the world are the three great factors of his mind. This is true from whatever standpoint we may look on it, whether we consider the mind as an inner experience of consciousness or as an organization of our behavior. Mind and Body 41 Knowledge, interest, and activity are combined wherever man is considered in his importance for commerce and industry. TEST QUESTIONS 1. What psychological problems are involved in selecting a clerk? A mechanic at a machine? A banker? 2. How is the mind related to this problem? 3. How can you actually find out what is another person's content of consciousness? 4. Why is it possible to read a person *s mind by observing his bodily behavior ? 5. What is meant by the perceptions ? 6. What are will-actions? 7. What are some familiar illustrations that show the unity of bodily and mental life ? 8. What is the real function of the brain in our life process ? 9. What physical changes take place in our nervous system in the learning process ? 10. What are the three great factors of the mind that are of practical importance to our problem? PART TWO KNOWLEDGE CHAPTER V SENSATION NATURE OF SENSATION If anyone in the world has to deal with concrete reali- ties and must know the facts of the outer world as they really are, it is the business man. He cannot base his work on thoughts and ideas and fancies. What he is doing is part of that great world machinery by which mankind masters stubborn nature in the interest of sat- isfying human needs. Whether he digs the minerals or harvests the crops, whether he transforms the raw ma- terial of nature into the finished products of the factories or carries this output to the merchants of the land, whether he sells these wares or distributes the standard ware of mankind, money, or whether he helps such pro- duction and distribution in a high or in a low place, in the office or behind the counter, in every case he must have a clear view of the objects of the outer world. The things which can be seen and heard and touched make up the world to which all business refers. Our first interest in the actions of the mind thus turns to the knowledge of the things which surround us, which we have to handle and to use. How do we perceive their col- ors or their noises, their weight or their temperature, their taste or their smell, their shape or their size, their number or their movements, their rhythm or their duration? 42 Sensation 43 Everybody knows how easily we are deceived by the outer world. Illusions creep in. It may be that such illusions are sometimes quite valuable for the business man. He may be anxious that the things which he puts in his shop window appear larger than they really are or more numerous than their objective number. But no- body wants to be deceived. Even the office boy may have to suffer if he does not know that in a certain light the blue stamp may appear green or that the large envelope on which he has to put stamps may appear lighter than a small one of the same weight. Whether we want to make use of the illusions of our senses or whether we want to protect ourselves against them, we must know first of all how our senses work and how we can rely on our per- ceptions and where the limits of our sense-functions lie. But we may discriminate the contents from their order. If we see a red or green or blue point, we may study the color impression and examine why it appears greenish or reddish or bluish. But if we see three blue points, or if we see the blueness spread over a whole area, or if we see blue points arranged in star form, or if that blue point lasts now for a second and now for ten seconds, or if the blue light alternates with the red light, then we are no longer interested in the content of our impressions but in the order of them, their space order, their time order, their number order. Every true perception of the outer world involves both. We must always ask: What is the mental material from which these impressions are built up and what is the special combination which gives us the idea of their length and form and time? These contents are called by the psychologist ''sensations." A mere tone or noise or smell or taste or color is a sensation in the mind. 44 Business Psychology COMPLEXITY OF SENSATIONS Our real experience of the world is, moreover, always a combination of such sensations, and only through the combination do things get their space and time form. We never see simply a patch of color, but we have before us perhaps a package in brown paper which has definite size and which stands before us at a definite distance. Even when a bell rings, we do not simply hear a tone, but it is a tone which lasts for a definite period and which comes from a special point in space. We speak, therefore, first of the sensations only and then of their combinations in real perceptions. But indeed we must not forget that these sensations are only the elements from which the real impressions are built up. They themselves are not complete; they are only the material out of which the mind shapes true impressions which always contain ref- erence to time and space. LIGHT IMPRESSIONS The most important group of impressions is certainly that of the light sensations. We live in surroundings which we know first of all from their optical nature, and everyone is aware of the infinite manifoldness of colors. The ribbon counter of the department store may have an abundance of colors, and yet the girl who wants to match the ribbon with her gown finds that just that par- ticular color is not to be had. It seems entirely hopeless to try to give a real account of all the lights which our eyes bring to us. The psychologist, however, is not alarmed by this task. On the contrary he soon discovers that this chaos can be brought into simple order, because what at first appears a simple color may be analyzed into still simpler elements. The abundance may result from Sensation 45 the combination of rather few elements, just as the rich- ness of our words in the language results from the com- bination of the few letters of the alphabet. But the letters are combined in the word in an external way, one standing beside another. This is not the case with our color-impressions. They are mixed in the mind ; they are felt as if they were one, and only by a compari- son with other colors can we resolve one color into sev- eral. A pure purple standing alone looks just as simple as a pure yellow, but if we arrange a series of mixtures of red and blue, beginning with the pure red and adding more and more blue until we have an almost pure blue, then we find our purple in the midst of that series, and in comparison with the others we recognize that it is a combination of reddishness and bluishness. Or that sen- sation which we call orange can by comparison be recog- nized as a mixture of red and yellow. What we call grey of any shade is the mixture of white and black. Our pink appears as a mixture of red and white, the brown as a mixture of yellow and black, the olive a mixture of green and black. If we carry through this analysis, we find that there are ultimately only six simple elements of visual sensation, white, black, red, yellow, green, and blue. LIGHT COMBINATIONS The combinations of white and black give us the color- less light grey sensations, while all the colors result from the combinations of those four other elements with one another or with the white and black. It can easily be seen that the number of combinations is unlimited, as any of these colors may enter into the mixture in any amount. The combination of white and red, for instance, is not confined to one particular pink, but if we take white water and red claret wine a few drops of wine in a glass 46 Business Psychology of water may give us a white which contains just the slightest possible tint of red; the more wine we pour in, the more reddish becomes the pink until its whitishness disappears altogether and we have the pure red color effect. Between such a reddish-white and complete reddish- ness there are many steps which the psychologist calls 11 different degrees of saturation." He speaks of a fully saturated color whenever no whitishness or greyishness or blackishness is in it, and the more this colorless ele- ment prevails, the lower is the degree of saturation. As long as we consider only the fully saturated colors which result from mixing pure red with yellow, or yellow with green, green with blue, or blue with red, we get about 150 different colors and each of them can by the mixture with white or black appear in any possible degree of satu- ration. Moreover each of these colored lights can pass through any degree of strength or intensity. Thus it is not surprising that hundreds of thousands of different color effects can be produced. THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIGHT SENSATIONS The physical sources of these lights are waves of ether, the same kind of waves as those which carry the wireless messages. But the waves of the wireless telegraphy are very long, the light waves extremely short. They follow one another in very rapid succession. The slowest light wave we can see at all consists of four hundred and fifty billion waves in a second ; that gives us the impression of red. The quickest has seven hundred and ninety billion in a second; that gives us the impression of violet. The condition for our seeing is that these very rapid ether waves reach the fine nerve endings in the back- ground of our eyeball, the so-called ' ' retina. ' ' These fine Sensation 47 nerve endings, of which about half a million are in each eye, form all together a kind of hollow cup which works like the photographic film in a camera. By the lens in the front of our eye the light which comes from one point in the outer world is thrown into one point of this retina. If we look into a room all the hundreds of thousands of nerve endings are excited at the same time, each one get- ting the light from one point. All these excited nerves are carrying their message to the brain, and there the visual sensations arise. The special color depends upon the rapidity of these ether vibrations. If those vibrations become stronger, the light appears more intense, and if different kinds of light are mixed, then the light decreases in saturation. What we call colorless light, the white and the grey, is usually a mixture of all kinds of lights, as indeed our white sunlight contains all possible rays. The rainbow colors of the spectrum show this, as they appear when the sunlight is dispersed by a prism. MODIFICATION OF LIGHT SENSATIONS BY THE EYE It is not enough, however, to understand that our color impressions correspond to certain light rays in the outer world. The processes in our eye are not simply trans- forming those light rays into our sensations; they are influencing one another. Only if we understand these mutual influences of the eye nerves can we foresee what a man will really perceive. Take this case: If we cut a grey piece of paper into little strips and we put one of the strips on a blue background, another on a red, another on a green, and one on a yellow background, we should no longer be able to recognize that they all were taken from the same sheet. The grey strip on the blue back- ground looks yellowish, on the yellow background bluish, 48 Business Psychology on the red background greenish, and on the green back- ground reddish. This shows that any impression on our eye is influenced not only by the light rays at the particu- lar spot, but also by the surrounding rays. This holds true of every kind of vision. It is always influenced by all the lights which enter into the eye. It makes a great deal of difference whether the desk of the clerk stands so that while he is reading or writing strong masses of light from the window or froaa the lamps must fall di- rectly into the side parts of his eyes. But our vision is not only dependent upon the sur- rounding impressions. It is no less influenced by the foregoing visual stimuli. If we look into an incandescent lamp, we can still see the light for a long while after turning our head toward the dark wall. If we look into a red lamp, we can see on a grey wall green spots, and if the lamp is green, we may get as an after-image red spots. Whatever we see is thus influenced by that which reached our eye immediately before. Moreover we see all the col- ors only in the central region of our field of vision. That which falls on the side parts of our eye has not any color at all for us, but appears only light or dark. Not a few men, about 2 per cent, have no sense of red and green; they are color-blind. If light becomes weak, as in late twilight, we all are entirely color-blind; then everything appears only grey and black. But our eye does not fur- nish us with colors if the light becomes overstrong either. Seen through a blue glass, the sun does not appear blue but white. We do not want to enter into the more subtle details of this visual process. It is only important to emphasize that our seeing of the surroundings is entirely dependent upon the laws of the nerve endings in our eye. One fact suggests itself even from these short observations which Sensation 49 we have mentioned, namely, that red and green stand in a specially intimate relation, and also yellow and blue. They are the so-called ' ' complementary colors. ' ' If they are mixed the color disappears altogether. If we have a pure yellow and a pure blue glass and put the one above the other, we see no color at all. On the other hand the one re-enforces the other if it precedes it, or if it sur- rounds it. If yellow costumes are to be displayed, a blue background would be the most effective, and if the gowns are blue, no background could make them more striking than a yellow one. The same relation exists for red and green. In a poster red figures become far more influen- tial if there is a greenish background. SOUND SENSATIONS The world of sound sensations is somewhat further re- moved from the interests of the business man. Of course, every spoken word belongs to the sphere of sound and even the melody which the office boy whistles is sound. But tones and noises are much less essential with regard to their sensation content. The words which are spoken interest us through their meaning, but not through their mere sound. It is important for the salesman that he see the colors of the wares correctly, but the sounds of the words which the customer speaks to him are to him indif- ferent as long as he understands correctly the meaning of the phrases. It may be sufficient to say here that all the sounds are either essentially tones or noises. The tones vary in their pitch from the lowest tones to the highest, in their intensity from the strongest to the faint- est, and in their timbre, that is, the particular tone char- acter which results from the various instruments. A tone of a special pitch does not become higher or lower, if it is given now by the piano, now by the human voice, 50 Business Psychology now by the violin, now by the trumpet, but its timbre is very different in each of these cases. The physical causes of these tones are vibrations of the mr in the direction to and from the ear. The lowest tones demand about thirty vibrations per second, and the high- est which the human ear can hear demand about forty thousand. Between these two limits about ten thousand tones can be discriminated by a good ear. Out of these only certain tones are selected for musical purposes, namely, those which stand in simple numerical relations. We select for music only those tones which have a num- ber of vibrations for which the relation can be expressed by small figures. One to two gives us the octave, two to three the fifth, four to five the third, three to four the fourth, three to five the sixth, eight to nine the second. That is, if we start from the tone of one hundred vibra- tions, the tone of two hundred is its octave, the tone of one hundred and fifty is its fifth. If several tones stand together, complex air waves result, which are resolved by the mechanism of the ear. We can hear a whole sym- phony over the telephone; yet there is only one simple iron diaphragm in the telephone, which at every moment swings under the influence of the vibrations which come from the hundred instruments of the orchestra. The ear disentangles that complex wave into those elementary waves which each instrument produces. The timbre which is characteristic of every instrument also results from such a combination of waves. Each violin or flute or piano or mouth cavity has its special combination of faint accompanying so-called overtones which melt into the chief tone. The inner ear contains a series of perhaps ten thousand little strings which, like a harp, respond to the vibrations of the surroundings. If a tone of five hundred vibrations comes to the ear, the Sensation 51 liquid in the inner ear enters into five hundred move- ments a second, and in that long harp of ten thousand microscopical strings the one string enters into vibration which is itself tuned for the five hundred move- ments a second. Then this one string carries the excite- ment to the brain in a special nerve fiber and gives there the one tone. If tones which are not musically related sound at 'the same time, a rough interference results. We hear beats, a kind of rough flickering of the sound, and if many such disharmonious tones come together, this roughness sup- presses the tones and we hear nothing but noise. All the lasting noises, like most of the speech elements, result from such mutual interference of tones. The short, ex- plosive, clicking noises, however, are produced when one strong to and fro movement of the air excites the ear. At least two such equal movements are necessary to give us a tone. TASTE AND SMELL SENSATIONS Taste and smell by their relation to the food industries are of great significance for the economic life. It is es- sential to understand that much which we call taste is really not true taste sensation. The psychologist recog- nizes only four kinds of taste, namely, sweet, salt, sour, and bitter. The thousand-fold tastes which eating and drinking can bring to consciousness result from the com- bination of these four simple taste sensations with tactual impressions in the mouth, with temperature impressions, and especially with smell impressions. Whatever we eat sends its vapors from the rear part of the mouth into the nose. Different kinds of meat or tea or wine or cand}' could not be discriminated, if we had to rely on taste sen- sations only. The softness or hardness, the warmth or 52 Business Psychology coldness, and above all the flavor are superadded to the mere sweetness of a sweet dish or to the mere bitterness of the tea. Those few true taste sensations are perceived with the help of the sense organs in the mouth. Those for the sweet and salt are mostly at the tip of the tongue and the edges, while those most sensitive for bitter are more frequently at the root of the tongue. Only liquids ran stimulate these little sense organs. That is, a hard thing like a lump of sugar cannot give a taste impression on an entirely dry tongue. The wetness of the tongue must dissolve the surface of the lump. The smell sensations, in striking contrast to the taste, are numberless, and it is almost arbitrary when we group them into a number of large classes and speak of the aromatic smells of the flowers or of the foul smells of decaying substances, and so on. Fine nerve endings in the upper channels of the nose receive these messages when the smell substance is carried by the passing stream of air. The sense organs become fatigued very quickly. Very soon the mind is adjusted to the smell and loses the impression. Certain smells stand in contrast re- lation ; after fatiguing the nerves by the one the other is felt the more strongly. OUR SO-CALLED FIFTH SENSE The sensations which are usually grouped together as those of a fifth sense can hardly be treated as sensations of one kind, if we take the scientific standpoint. The touch impressions, for instance, and the temperature im- pressions may both be received by the skin. Yet they are mentally quite different, and moreover they are dependent upon different sense organs in the skin. Not every point on the surface of our body can receive mes- sages of cold or warmth or pressure. If we cool the point Sensation 53 of a sharpened pencil in snow and move it slowly over the back of our hand, we feel that at certain points a sharp, cold impression flashes up. We might mark these points with little crosses. If we now warm the pencil and move it along the same way we feel the warm impression ap- pearing also at special points, but never at the same ones which gave us cold. We may mark these warm points with little circles. But if finally we begin to take the pointed pencil when it is neither warmer nor colder than the hand and simply try to find the places where the skin is most sensitive to pressure, we discover that these places of tactual sensitiveness are neither where we made the little crosses nor where we marked the little circles. Thus the skin contains three different kinds of sense organs, one which receives the cold impressions, one which is adjusted to the warm impressions, and one which serves the perception of touch. But we may add still a fourth group. If we take a sharply pointed pin which easily penetrates the super- ficial layers of the skin, we can find certain points at which a sharp pain sensation arises, while at other points this is absent, unless our pin reaches the nerves in the deeper layers. This shows that the skin also con- tains special organs for pain. To be sure, in practical life we usually call pain not a sensation but a feeling. But the word " feeling" is used in psychology in a nar- rower sense. Feeling refers always to our personal lik- ing or disliking, to the pleasantness or unpleasantness. Now it is certain that every pain sensation is disliked, is disagreeable, but it is this disagreeableness which we ought to call the feeling, not the pain which we dislike. We may also dislike a noise or a smell, but we do not call the smell or the noise a feeling. Our liking and disliking will interest us when we speak of the personal interests, 5 54 Business Psychology but as long as we speak of sensations we ignore the ques tion whether we like or dislike them and consider only the content of the sensations. Hence we must say that there are four separate kinds of skin sensations, namely, touch, cold, warmth, and pain. We should speak, accordingly, of eight senses instead of the traditional five. The touch impression can appear in all intensities from the softest contact to the strongest pressure. The great variety of tactual impressions results from the combina- tion of tactual sensations in space and time. Every mer- chant and every manufacturer has to discriminate by touch the subtler qualities of the wares. Differences of smoothness and roughness, of hardness and softness, of evenness and unevenness, can be easily detected by the touching finger. Yet they do not really represent differ- ences of tactual sensations as such. It is the same touch sensation which gives us now softness and now rough- ness, just as it is the same light sensation which gives us now a continuous light and now a flickering one. The flickering light is a quick alternation between light and darkness; the rough surface gives us a quick alternation between touch and interruption of touch. On the other hand the hardness and softness refer to the resistance which the pressure of the finger finds, that is, to the move- ment which the hand can carry out in touching the object. The subtlest discrimination of tactual impressions is given to the most movable organs of the body, the finger tips, the tip of tht tongue, and so on. BODILY SENSATIONS We have spoken here only of those sensations for whieh the source lies outside of the body. But, after all, we have the same kind of message to the brain from the physical world when the source lies in the limbs or in tke Sensation 55 trunk of the body. When we move our legs the contract- ing muscles give us a muscle sensation which is very similar to the touch sensation which the skin furnishes, and surely the pain which may come from a cramp in the muscles from overfatigue belongs in the same class as pain sensations starting in the skin. The psychologist is therefore justified in enlarging the sphere of sensations beyond the mere outer senses. He includes all the im- pressions which originate in the various organs of the body and which stimulate the little sense organs in the muscles, joints, and inner tissues of the organism. All the pains in a disease, all the so-called organic sensations, hunger or thirst, all the movement sensations from the contracting muscles, from the pressure of joints, from the tension of the tendons, are to be recorded here. These movement sensations, especially, are funda- mental for the organization of our inner life, and we shall soon discover that they are responsible for the whole development and the structure of our experience. No workingman in the factory could perform his task if he had sensations only from his eyes and ears and skin, and did not have sensations from his own muscles and joints. Every movement which he performs sends such a sensa- tion message to his brain and makes him aware of the extent of the movement. It is this group of sensations especially which leads us over to the perception of space and time. TEST QUESTIONS 1. How does a business man secure his knowledge of the facts with which he deals? 2. Are you familiar with any illusions that occur with refer- ence to the use of our senses? What causes them? 3. Of what practical value is it to understand how our senses produce illusions? 56 Business Psychology 4. How does the psychologist analyze colors? What does he mean by saturated colors? 5. How can a business man apply this knowledge about colors and color combinations to practical everyday use? 6. What physical conditions actually produce the different color effects? 7. How does the structure of the eye modify color impres- sions ? 8. What is the meaning of tone, pitch, and timbre ? 9. In what industries is a knowledge of the touch and smell senses especially important? 10. What is the relation of inner and bodily sensations to in- dustrial efficiency? CHAPTER VI THE PERCEPTIONS GROUPING OF OUE SENSATIONS If we stand in the office or in the factory or in the mar- ket, we are surrounded by visual and acoustical impres- sions, and even our touch sense and our temperature sense and too often our smell sense may be engaged. Yet it would be a very incomplete description if we were to speak only of the sensations of which we become aware. We see shaped things in definite forms. It is not simply a chaos of sensations, but the impressions come to us in organized groups with space and time and number char- acter. We do not see simply patches of grey and white and black light, but we see a typewriting machine on which each key and each lever has its definite form, and we do not simply hear a noise, but the noise has rhyth- mical time shape. The perception of the things which surround us and which interest us demands far more than the mere awareness of those masses of sensations which enter into them. Their grouping is essential. Yet let us not forget that we are speaking so far only about the impressions which we receive from without. In seeing the typewriting machine before me I might eas- ily accredit to the perception more than the mere impres- sion contains. I might fancy that I see that this is a Remington machine and that this part is a shift key, that the typewriter can be used with a two-colored ribbon, and that it is better than the older models. But as soon as we 57 58 Business Psychology begin to analyze this knowledge psychologically, it be- comes clear that all this is superadded by the mind. It refers to ideas in us which result from earlier experiences with a machine or from hearsay, but nothing of this is contained in the immediate perception of the machine. At every moment we add reminiscences of our earlier experiences to that which we actually perceive. When we understand the words of the letter which we read, we per- ceive only those forms of the words which would not differ if the language were unknown to us. We perceive a page in Japanese print exactly as well as the Japanese perceives it. The fact that he connects with every sign an idea which gives meaning to it lies outside of the process of perception. We have to consider first only that which we really perceive with our senses. SPACE FORM OF OUR IMPRESSIONS The chief psychological interest turns to the space form of our impressions, and we may naturally empha- size the space character of our visual perceptive ideas. We have before us a typewritten page. It is more than merely black and white ; it is black in a particular order of black points; it is this order which groups the black dots into letters, and only this order is important for us. We need not consider at first the fact that we read with two eyes. We see the shapes of the word just as well with one eye only. We may say that for all flat objects, like a printed page or picture, it makes no difference whether we look at it with one eye or with two. If my right eye alone looks on the typewritten page, the one letter which I am just fixating falls into the center of the retina, a region in which the nerve elements are nearest together and in which the most distinct vision is possible. Perceptions 59 At the same time all the other letters of the page stimulate definite regions in the side parts of the eye. The half million retina elements can pick up all the points in the surroundings at the same time. Yet this would mean only that hundreds of thousands of light impres- sions come at one moment to our mind. What does it mean that we recognize space relations between any two points in this field! The mere manifoldness alone does not give us this idea of distance. "When we hear music, many tones may come at the same time to our mind ; and yet we do not say that the space distance between two tones is five times larger than the space distance between two other tones. And if a bouquet of flowers brings us several smells at the same time, we discriminate them without feeling that they form a circle or a triangle. Those smells and tones are not grouped in space. Why do we group the lights ? Why do we not simply feel that there are a lot of light impressions ? We must introduce here a principle which we shall soon find to be of greatest importance. We referred to it in a general form when we spoke of the nervous system. We said that the purpose of the nervous system is to respond to impressions by actions. Now every light impression which comes to the eyes produces in the brain the impulse to a large number of actions. We are concerned here only with one type of action, namely, the eye movements which are carried out under the control of the visual impres- sions. We said that only the center of the retina is fit to give us the sharpest discrimination. Everything which stimulates the side parts of our eye appears therefore rather indistinct and vague. We do not see its details. The great function of the brain centers which control the eye movements is therefore to secure such actions of the eyeball as to bring the vaguely seen thing into the fixation 60 Business Psychology point. Whatever falls on the side parts of the retina awakes in the brain such an impulse that the eye is turned toward it, so that its chances improve and it can be seen in detail. That which is above the fixation point produces an upward eye movement; that which is to the left a left side movement; that which is near to the fixation point involves only a slight motor impulse ; that which is far out from the center near the margin of the visual field de- mands a strong motor impulse. The mere need of getting clear images and of thus bringing everything into the fixation point involves a constant movement of the eyeball. This is performed by six big bundles of muscles which are inserted in the tough white membrane into which the eyeball is packed. These muscles give us slight sensations; we are aware of whether we turn the eye to the right or to the left, up or down, and this is ultimately the condition of our con- sciousness of direction and distance, that is, of space per- ception in the plane surface. "We see the black ink on the paper distributed in the particular letter forms and per- ceive these shapes as space distances from point to point, because we need impulses to eye movements in going from one point to another. VISUAL, ILLUSIONS If our perception of distance and direction depends upon the extent and character of our eye movement re- sponses, it is to be expected that illusions will occur when- ever these movements are re-enforced or diminished. In practical life we often compare an empty space with a filled one. The filled one appears larger. For instance, the empty distance between two points appears shorter than a dotted line of the same length. This is natural, because in the case of the empty distance our eyes fixating Perceptions 61 first at the one end point can move in an undisturbed, sim- ple eye movement to the other. But if we have the dotted line, the eyes make jerking movements from one point to the next throughout the series, and this involves a sum- mation of movement impulses which givs the impression of a bigger space. OPTICAL ILLUSIONS minimi A. The divided half of the line appears longer than the un- divided. B. If the square is filled with horizontal lines, its vertical dimension appears larger than the horizontal ; if it is filled with vertical lines, the horizontal appears larger than the vertical. C. The straight line which passes obliquely behind the double rectangle does not appear straight. Business Psychology D. The two parallel lines through which the oblique lines pass appear bent outward. B. The circle appears bent inward where it touches the corners of the square. F. The little circles appear to be hexagon -,. Perceptions 63 G. The lower figure appears larger than the upper, while they are of equal size. The psychologist knows and accounts for numberless, often troublesome, illusions of that kind. Small angles are overestimated, straight lines appear crooked, forms ap- pear distorted, whenever the special conditions suggest too strong or too weak an eye movement. The eye sweeps more easily in the horizontal direction than in the vertical, because the attachment of the eye muscles to the eyeball demands a very simple action for the right-left movement, but a rather complex one for the up-down motion. The result is that the latter appears a little more difficult and therefore a vertical line appears longer than a horizontal one of the same length. We have no right nor can we afford to ignore these illusions in daily life. The artisan and the engineer, the architect and the draughtsman, have to count with them at every step. Even the light intensity may influence these eye movements. Strong light stirs up stronger impulses to motion than faint light. The result is that the white object appears larger than the dark, the hand 64 Business Psychology in a white glove, larger than in a black glove. We have that impression even when no comparisons are possible ; for example, a room with a light wall paper appears larger than one with a dark one. PERCEPTION OF DISTANCE It is interesting to see how this same principle of move- ment influence is effective also when not the seeing of the plane surface but the perception of distance from the eye is involved, that is, nearness or farness. Of course we often decide whether an object is near or far from us be- cause it appears large or small. Moreover we rely on the perspective and on the shadows. We have a certain help also in the activities of the lens in our eye. The nearer the object, the stronger must be the tension in our lens in order to get a sharp image, as through the increased tension the lens becomes more strongly curved and ad- justs itself to the greater narrowness of our visual object. By far the most important condition for our seeing, whether things are near or far, lies in the working to- gether of our two eyes. We have said that we can read a page just as well with one eye as with two. But whether the wheel of a machine in the factory at which we are working is nearer or farther demands our seeing it with two eyes, and if one of our eyes is covered, we may at any moment easily catch our hand in the wheel, because we cannot judge the distance correctly. But when the two eyes work in harmony we are able to discriminate the subtlest differences of depth and distance. Even if two trees stand several hundred feet away from us, we can still discriminate whether the one is a few feet nearer to us than the other. The reason for this is that the two eyes see the objects Perceptions 65 from two different points of view. The two images in the two eyes are therefore never exactly the same, unless the object is simply a plane surface. If I look at a picture my two eyes see everything alike, as the distance between any two points must appear equal from the standpoint of the right and of the left eye. But if instead of looking at a picture I look at the head of a man with whom I am talking, my two eyes get very different images. The dis- tance from my friend's nose to his left ear must appear to my right eye much greater than to my left eye, as the left eye gets a foreshortened view. Thus I have two dif- ferent images, and they would produce double images if nothing else happened. That is, if I fixate his left ear, turning my eyes so that his ear falls into my two fixa- tion points, then the picture of his nose would fall on two not corresponding points in my two eyes, and I should therefore see my man with two noses. This is actually the case if I fixate his ear sharply. But in practical life we never do that. We always per- form eye movements by which we bring everything which interests us into the fixation points of the two eyes. In- stead of seeing the nose double, we quickly change the convergence of our eyes and look toward our man's nose. Now his nose appears single, because it falls in both of our eyes on the corresponding fixation point, while his ear would now appear double if we were to give atten- tion to it. In other words our eyes are constantly moving in order to avoid seeing double. We want to get one im- pression only from the single objects of the outer world and to secure that we must continually change by eye movements the convergence of the eyes ; that is, we must perform movements in order to get distinct vision from objects which lie at different distances from us. What- 66 Business Psychology ever is near to us demands that we bring the eyes nearer together. The further distant the object, the less the convergence. If we look at a star, our eyes look out entirely parallel. Every distance is thus characterized by a definite impulse for the moving together of the two eyes. Hence we have here too the eye movements as conditions for our feeling of depth. The seeing of near and far is then just as much dependent upon the muscle action of our eyes as the seeing of right and left or up and down. SPACE PERCEPTION IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE BODY Our space perception is not confined to our eyes. Our fingers do not receive only scattered touch sensations, but furnish us too the ideas of definite forms. The work- ingman in the factory in his routine work relies on his tactual space impressions no less than on the visual. But we may discriminate between our active and our passive perceptions. In the one case we become aware of a tac- tual distance by performing a movement. We measure the length of a table by moving the tip of the finger along the edge. The tactual impression remains the same, but by its combination with the muscle sensation from the moving arm we build up the idea of the table's length. In the passive perception our hand or arm may remain at rest, and we become aware of a distance by being touched at two different points of the skin. But it is very characteristic that this power of our skin to dis- criminate two points at a special distance from each other is very differently developed at various parts of the body. A few simple experiments prov the point. If we take a compass with the two points at a distance of a twentieth part of an inch, the tip of our forefinger Perceptions 67 can discriminate the two tactual impressions, and so can the tip of our tongue or the inside of the lips. But if we put the oompass on the back of our hand, the two points appear as one only; we do not notice the distance. The two ende of the compass must now be put a third of an inch distant in order to be felt at two different places, and if we touch the shoulder the distance of the two points must be perhaps a half inch and on the back perhaps a whole inch. But it is evident that the back is less mov- able than the shoulder, and the shoulder less movable than the arm, and this less than the hand and this less than the finger. We have the subtlest space discrimina- tion in the most movable organs, a fact which is full of consequences for all kinds of manual work. It indicates in a new form that our space judgment is intimately re- lated to our motions. LOCALIZATION OF SOUNDS Our localizing of sounds confirms this truth. If we hear a whistle sounding from the right or from the left, we are never mistaken. But if it sounds from behind we just as often take it to be coming from in front, and if it sounds in front of us, we often believe that it comes from behind. The direct cause is that when the sound comes from our right side, our right ear gets much more impression than the left, and we should never confuse it with the sound from the other side. But if it comes from in front or from behind, both ears get an equal amount of sound, and we are unable to know which is which. Yet we do not know anything of this different distribution of sound in the two ears, and that alone would not give us any consciousness of space. We hear only one sound and 68 Business Psychology do not know whether we hear it more in the one or more in the other ear. Tht decisive factor is that this excitation in the two ears produces a definite movement reaction. As soon as the right ear gets more sound than the left, the brain sends out an impulse to move the head toward the right. It is a natural response to turn the head toward the source of the sound. We learn to ignore that impulse and to keep the head at rest, but the brain impulse toward such a movement exists nevertheless, and it combines with the sound. The whistle appears as coming from the right, because we hear the sound together with the move- ment impulse of the head toward the right. In short, whether we rely on our eyes or on our skin or on our ears, the world is to us a world of shape and order and form because we respond .to the impressions by our move- ments. PEBCEPTTON OP TIME This same influence of our own bodily responses can be traced in our perception of time. Our knowledge covers the whole stretch of time far beyond our personal mem- ories and expectations. We can think of past centuries. But this thinking of long stretches of time would be meaningless to us if we did not know some bits of time from our direct experience. If we hear the clock strike, we notice that the time between any two strokes is equal. If the last stroke comes a little too late, we feel at once that the time is longer. Here we have really an imme- diate awareness of the passing of time. Take the case that we hear a signal, after half a minute a second signal, and a third one after fifteen seconds ; we can easily notice that the second interval is shorter than the first. Perceptions 69 What have we noticed? Nothing happened in those intervals. How can we become aware of the empty time between those signals? But anyone who tries to make such an experiment soon discovers that the intervals were not really empty. It is true nothing happened from without; no sound, no sight may have broken in. But very much did happen in our body, in our muscles and joints ; and we became aware of it. When we heard that first signal, a general tension resulted in our muscle system, a tension which helps us to turn our attention to the sound. As soon as that first sound has gone, a re- laxation follows; and now we wait for the next sound. This waiting brings a new tension, which after a short while may be relieved again, and so we feel an up and down, mostly together with our breathing movements in the organism. At a certain point the second signal breaks in, and then we have an idea of the whole interval from the total combination of the sound impressions and the impressions of tension and relaxation. As soon as the new interval begins we imitate this play of our body ; we try to go through the same tensions and relaxations. The second interval appears to us shorter, because the last sound breaks in before we have repeated that whole story of bodily sensation. This feeling of tension and re- laxation becomes the foundation of our direct conscious- ness of time. If we divide any period of time rhythmically into equal parts, each rhythmical unit, for instance, every bar in music, is equal to the other, because each time we pass through the same tension and relief. From these short time intervals which we perceive directly we can build up the whole system of our time. As soon as we have to do with longer time intervals we have no possibility of 6 70 Business Psychology direct experience, but then we rely on the idea of the contents which filled the time. Looking backward one week appears to us longer than another week, because there was more content. We had richer and more mani- fold experience. A month of travel with an abundance of interesting and new events appears to us in our memory far longer than a monotonous month in a dreary place where nothing happened. We simply rely on the rich- ness of the material which filled the time. But it is entirely different with our awareness of the time while we pass through such periods. When we lived through that dreary month, the time passed extremely slowly, and when we had that month of beautiful travel, the time seemed to fly. There is no contradiction. When we are going through a period of time, we feel its passing, as we saw, by our waves of tension and relaxa- tion. If nothing happens, we are constantly waiting for something to come. We are therefore in a perpetual state of tension, and that gives us a feeling of very long time. When our time is crowded with engagements, every moment impresses itself on us by that which we are really doing. Then preparatory tensions do not come into our consciousness at all. We live entirely in the outer events and ignore the passing of time. The experi- ence of passing through a full or an empty period of time is fundamentally different from the memory of a past time. MEANING AND IMPRESSIONS We see that our impressions of the surrounding world have time and space order alike because we respond to them by our activities, by our movements, by our ten- sions. Finally we may add that our responses by action, or at least by preparation for action, also furnish mean- Perceptions 71 ing to our impressions. We see table and chair, scissors and fountain pen, hammer and saw. Each gives us the impression of a thing, but its real value lies in the fact that it is more to us than merely a physical thing. It has a meaning, a purpose, a value. The chair is some- thing to sit on, the fountain pen something to write with, the hammer something to pound with, and the impulse to these activities interprets the impressions. As long as we do not know how to use the thing, it has no meaning for us. Its meaning deepens with our understanding of the particular use, and its meaning is completely known to us as soon as we master its use, just as even a word which we read or which we hear has meaning for us only if we know in what situation to use it. Our own impulses to action and to the use of things transform the mean- ingless impressions of the world into a world in which everything has its meaning and value. Such a psychological analysis of our perceptions must be made by everyone who wants to understand the work- ing of the mind. It is common ground for all psychologies and in no way confined to business psychology. Yet it is evident that the man of practical affairs has an especial interest in giving his attention to this close con- nection between our impressions of the things around us and our own actions. The material to which his com- mercial or industrial work is devoted has no meaning and therefore no value in itself. It gets its value only by becoming material for human activities. They fur- nish the meaning. 72 Business Psychology TEST QUESTIONS 1. How does mere awareness of a thing differ from the per- ception of its space, time, and number t 2. Do we get our knowledge of relationships through the sense perceptions or through the mind itself? 3. How do we get our perceptions of space ? 4. How does the question of optical illusions interest the busi- ness man ? Can you suggest half a dozen such illusions ? 5. "What should a shoe salesman know about optical illusions ? 6. How do we get our perceptions of distance ? 7. Why would you feel uneasy riding in an automobile with a one-eyed chauffeur? 8. Why does a dull day seem long in living through it? A busy day short? 9. Why does a dull day seem short in memory, while an eventful day appears long? 10. What application do you see of these last two factors in relation to industry? 11. From a psychological standpoint what is the value of a clean factory? Whatever our work may be it is never based only on that which we really perceive around us. At every mo- ment our actions are controlled by our impressions to- gether with a mass of ideas, memories, thoughts, which are added to the given perceptions from our own re- sources. Impressions are related to wider experiences. The business man sees the letter in his hand and per- ceives the words with their meaning. But his reply re- fers not only to that which is actually contained in the written page, but to his whole earlier correspondence with the writer and to his reminiscences of conversa- tions with him. Moreover he must remember all the details of his affairs, the wares he has in stock, his prices, his calculations, his advertisements and those of his competitors, if he is to answer that business letter. He must consider thousands of facts which are available in his memory in order that his answer and decision may be really adjusted to the whole business situation. What he actually perceives is only a small fraction of the world of facts to which he wants to adapt his response. We all move and live not only in the surroundings which we per- ceive, but in that wider world of facts of which we have knowledge otherwise than by mere perception of our senses. How do we know the facts which we do tot per- ceive? 73 74 Business Psychology We may disregard at first the mental products which we reach by mere imagination. That is not true knowl- edge. Our imagination may sometimes lead us to correct knowledge, but it may just as well bring us to errors and illusions. Later we shall see how important imagina- tion is for every business man, but it is not a source of actual knowledge. For this everybody must rely on memory and on thought, in addition to his perceptions. The manufacturer who discusses the sale of his. goods must know what he has to sell. While he discusses the details, he does not really perceive the goods in his stock, as they are not stored up in his office. But first, he re- members the piles which he has actually seen in the store- room, and second, he can form a conclusion as to the quantities which are heaped up in other parts of his factory and which he himself has not seen. He remem- bers what orders he has given, he knows with what exactitude his orders are filled, and by mere thought- processes he thus reaches the knowledge that the manu- factured goods are really existing, although he has never seen them. It is a pure act of logical thinking which makes him know how much stock is under his roof. How does this separation of memory and thought look from the standpoint of the psychologist? We said that the remembering of the goods is based on a previous actual perception, but the thinking out of the quantities of goods is not based on actually seeing them before and therefore has nothing to do with memory. This is per- fectly true, and yet the psychologist must add something very essential. He must insist that even those products of thought are psychologically nothing but combinations of memory. All the mental elements which enter into such a thought product must be known from earlier percep- tions. The thought brings them into new combinations ; but no thought, and we may add at once no imagination, Memory and Ideas 75 can bring anything into consciousness which is not ulti- mately a mere reawaking of earlier impressions. The artist can imagine a new picture, but cannot im- agine any color in that picture which he has not seen beforehand. His boldest imagination can work only with those sensations which he remembers, that is, which he has had before and which his mind now reproduces. No thinker can produce thoughts the elements of which are not reproductions of earlier impressions. The business man who figures up the newly manufactured stock which he has not yet seen is getting an idea of it only from the mental material which he gathered before by actual per- ception. Our memories and our thought-ideas are built up from the same kind of elements and their only source is the earlier perception of the world. In our memory we renew the perceptions of the past in the same order in which we received them ; in our thoughts we combine them in a new order; but we can not invent any new elements. IMPRESSION v. ITS REPBODUCTTON While we said that our memory is a renewing of our earlier impressions, we must not forget that there re- mains a difference between the impression and its reproduction. When we remember the man with whom we talked last year, we may see every detail of his face be- fore our mind ; we may even have the power to renew in our mind every wrinkle in his forehead, the exact color of his eyes and his hair, and we may even see his necktie. Yet not for a moment do we believe that we really see the man before us. If we were to take our memory-pic- ture for a real perception, we should have what the psy- chologist calls a "hallucination." Such hallucinations are symptoms of mental diseases. In normal life they oc- 76 Business Psychology cur in our dreams. The dreamer really believe* that his friend whose picture comes to his mind in sleep is present, but when he is awake he would never think that the man whose face he sees in his memory is actually present. If it were otherwise he would be unable to live a reasonable life ; he would never know what is real and what not. In sleep there is no harm in such hallucinations, be- cause the sleeper does not act ; he lies without motion in his bed, and it makes no difference whether he knows or does not know that the remembered and imagined sur- roundings are unreal. But if the business man in his office were unable to discriminate between the visitor who really enters through the door and the imagined visitor who simply enters over the threshold of his memory, he would live in a state of complete confusion. This is the reason why we call hallucinations symptoms of diseases and put the suffering patient into an asylum where he is protected against these dangerous mental tendencies. For the normal man it is absolutely essential that everything which his memory or his thought or his imagi- nation brings to his consciousness be somehow different from everything which is actually perceived. And yet, as we said, it may contain every possible detail of the perception. Nor have we a right to say that the differ- ence is simply one of intensity. The impressions do not become darker or fainter. If we remember a bright color, it does not become dull in our memory, and if we remem- ber a loud sound it does not become weak. We can re- member the faintest sound and the dimmest light; and yet they do not disappear in memory by further decrease of intensity. No, the strength of the impressions re- mains in memory the same as in the original experience. The change refers neither to the contents nor to the strength of the impressions. It is a change which has Memory and I deaf 77 often been called a " change of vividness." The place or face or speech which we merely remember is less vivid, less real, less striking, than that which we actually see or hear. If we relate these facts to the brain processes, we should say that all our remembering is a renewing of those brain processes which at first are started from our sense organs and which now appear again without being stimulated by the senses. When we really saw a build- ing, every window and every corner stimulated the retina in our eye and this excitation was carried to the rear part of our brain. Exactly these same brain processes are reproduced when we remember the building, but this time the excitation does not come from the retina; it comes from some other brain processes which preceded the memory. The vividness of reality evidently results only when the brain gets its excitation from the sense organs, but when the same excitation originates in the brain itself, the accompanying mental experience is less vivid and less real. REPRODUCTION' OF IMPRESSIONS The individual differences in the ability to renew earlier impressions are very great. Many people have hardly any power to reproduce visual impressions or at least their visual reproductions are very vague or lack all color. Again others have very small reproductive power for sound impressions. And finally there are many individuals whose visual and acoustical memory is poor, but who reproduce very easily their original move- ment sensations. In a way, their whole memory consists of memories of actions. The muscle and joint sensa- tions which are experienced during the activities are bet- 78 Business Psychology ter reproduced by them than the sights or sounds to which the actions responded. These differences are of thousand-fold importance in the business world, and everyone ought to know how his own memory and the memories of people with whom he is in contact are really working. If the stenographer has to remember a telephone number, it will be beet to speak it to her if her memory is essentially acoustical. But it will be well to write it down for her if her memory is es- sentially visual. And it will be wisest to make her repeat it either by having her write it or say it if her memory is essentially of that motor type. As soon as she speaks or writes it, it has become a set of her own movements, and they will easily reproduce themselves, while the mere sound or sight would quickly fade away. LAWS OP MEMOBT ASSOCIATION Onr memory works in accordance with definite laws. The fundamental one is that each impression or idea calls back to our mind earlier experiences which were connected with it. This connection may have been one of neighborhood in space. A man comes into our office and the sight of him awakes at once the memory of the hotel lobby where we met him last year. We saw that hotel background and the man together in space and the two images remained connected. When the one is re- newed, the other will follow. If we had again gone to that lobby, it would have reminded us of the man whom we met there. But the contact may be one which is in- dependent of space. The two experiences may simply have come together. The man who enters our office may first of all awake in us the memory of his name, just as Memory and Ideas 79 his name might have stirred up the memory of his face. In our original impression we saw the face and heard the name, and they were coupled, or, as the psychologist says, they formed an association. As soon as one of them is renewed by experience the other by the laws of association is drawn into consciousness. In this case the two associated impressions come to consciousness at the same time. But an association may also be formed if they are im- mediately succeeding. If the first words of a sentence which we heard are brought back to us, the other words will come to our memory. We can trace in our mind all the stages of a journey. Each experience pulls into our consciousness the memory of the following or preceding one. If we have to perform a complex series of acts in a technical piece of work, the performing of the first act awakes in us the idea of the second, and the performing of the second stirs up the memory-picture of the third. The association of ideas is not confined to such cases of immediate neighborhood in space and time. The man who enters our office may be entirely unknown to us. We never saw him before. Yet he reminds us at once of an old acquaintance the memory-picture of whom rushes to our consciousness. This man before us and our friend of whom he reminds us were never together in our experi- ence ; and yet the sight of the one recalls the other simply because they have similarity to each other. But what we call similarity is ultimately only a community of parts. In the mental pictures of the one and the other man there must be something in common. Otherwise we should not call them similar. Everywhere we speak of similarity only if the two objects share some elements. They may be elements of the content or elements of the form. But if this is the case, then this association by similarity ap- 80 Business Psychology pears in a new light. It too can be reduced to a mere being together. The common features are in the one impression together with one group and in the other im- pression with another group of sensations. The nose and the eyes of the man whom we see entering were together with an entirely different mouth and chin and forehead in our acquaintance. They are together with one set of features in the one face and with another set of features in another face. They bring back the picture of the other man simply because they were together with those accompanying features in the earlier impression. Similarity is a rich source of our memories, but it does not introduce a new principle ; it is an association based on the earlier being together of the parts. In other words all associations are at bottom nothing but the returning of that which in an earlier experience was connected with the present impressions. In a good memory those con- nected impressions respond very easily; in a poor mem- ory they are awakened with difficulty, but no memory is equally good or bad in all directions. A memory may be excellent for faces and names or funny stories and yet very poor for numbers or places and perhaps entirely defective for melodies. REPETITION, FRESHNESS, AND IMPRESSIVENBSS But it is not sufficient to understand that all remem- bering is based on the reawaking of the experiences which were connected in earlier impressions. Our mind would be a chaos if everything rushed into it which ever was connected with our present experience. If we looked into our room and everything reminded us of everything else which was ever linked with it, if every chair reminded us of the place where we bought it or of the people who have sat on it and of all possible chairs which have similarity Memory and Ideas 81 to it, from every single impression a whole avalanche of memories would break into the field of our consciousness. Yet we all know that only a few memory-images appear at any one time. A selection must occur. At every moment most of the material which we might remember remains outside of consciousness and only a few associa- tions are admitted. This selection is not one of our own conscious effort. It goes on without our knowing it, and we can easily find the causes which control it. It is first of all the frequency of our earlier experi- ences. The more often two impressions were together in our mind the greater is the chance that later the return of the one will awake the memory of the other. But even every school-child knows that there is one method still more reliable for the moment than frequent repetition, namely, the freshness of the connection. The school- child looks quickly over his lesson just before the examination begins. He knows that that which has just preceded will be ready for reproduction in his mind. Finally those connections are favored which made a deep impression on us, which gave us a special joy or pain or attracted our attention strongly or gave us a shock. The traveling salesman who wants to be sure that in his talk with his customer all the facts concerning his wares and their prices and the ways of shipping are per- fectly at his disposal, must try to profit from all three ways to help the memory. He must have frequently studied the material and connected the wares with the prices. If he has repeated them well, he can be sure that they will be at his disposal at any time. The mere repetition has improved those brain connections. The nerve paths in which the excitation runs over from one group of brain cells to another offer less and less resist- ance the more often they are used. But our traveling 82 Business Psychology salesman will profit just as mnoh from going over his notes quickly before he makes his visit. What he looked over may be very superficial in his mind, and the con- nections may be so loose that they will be forgotten to- morrow, but at first these recent impressions have so much energy in his brain that they are still more easily reproduced than that which has been ingrained by fre- quent repetition. And as to our third factor, our travel- ing salesman will surely not forget those goods and prices with which an unusually high extra commission for him is connected. The idea of his own advantage with its strong emotional pleasure has forced this particular con- nection so fully upon his mind that he will certainly not forget it, SELECT-TV* POWER OF MEMOBY Yet we must consider one other aspect. The repetition, the freshness, and the impressiveness of our memory ma- terial may well explain why certain facts are better held in our mind than others. The street address which we have read on letter paper many times will be firmer in our mind than one which we read only once. The address which we read this morning may still be present, while that which we read last week has faded away. And the address which was strongly impressed on us by being heavily underlined will stick to us better than that which came inconspicuously. Yet these three factors alone can- not explain to us which ideas actually will enter our mind. We must consider a further feature of the situation. Our memory never stands under one influence only. Our mind is never a blank in which only one impression or one idea exists and in which accordingly one content alone starts the memory-ideas. We always have a large number of impressions or ideas in our consciousness, and Memory and Ideas 83 all of them work together. The memory-ideas which really appear are those which are stirred up by all the ideas present at the same time. The whole situation, the whole background, influences the choice of the mem- ory-ideas. Our memory does not throw into our mind all kinds of fresh or frequently repeated or impressive ma- terial which happens to be somehow connected with a name or a phrase which we hear or with a thing which we see. But it selects among them only those ideas which are appropriate to the whole situation. We have ideas of the situation in our mind and they all work to- gether in strengthening that memory material which is related to all of them. Our memory is a great selective agency. We do not select the memory-images by a con- scious effort, but the ideas present in us secure this se- lective effect by their own mutual influence. Hence we can trust our memory not only to be ready to furnish us with material but to sift the material before it comes to our knowledge. THE MEMORY PROCESS Where did those memory-ideas remain in the mean- time? Where are the names and dates and all our knowledge stored up until the memory brings them to our consciousness? Psychologists dispute much about this problem, and they are grouped in two large camps. The one party says all those ideas are in the unconscious, or, as some like to call it, in the subconscious mind; that is, they are somewhere in the mind but not in the conscious mind. In the other camp it is claimed that the ideas have existence only when they ar in consciousness and that before their appearance in our conscious experience they do not exist at all as mental ideas. What does exist is a certain disposition in our brain cells. We see the room S4 Business Psychology around us because it stimulates our eye and through our eye our brain cells. Thus our perception was not some- where in the mind before this stimulation of our brain. The same holds true of the memory. The brain cells be- oome excited, this time not by the stimulation of the sense organs, the eye and ear, but by a stimulation from other brain centers. The memory-idea arises exactly as in the case of perception entirely new through the action of the brain cells. The experiences of yesterday exist in us then not as subconscious ideas but as physical dispo- sitions of our brain cells to go through that same action which they passed through when we saw and heard and touched the world of yesterday. This dispute, however, hardly concerns the man of practical affairs. The salesman who wants to rely on the stored-up knowledge of his business details has really no interest to know whether those figures or firm names exist in him as unconscious ideas which he can call to consciousness or whether they are dispositions of his brain cells which he can awake to that brain activity which is accompanied by conscious knowledge. For his practical purposes it is entirely indifferent which theory is accepted. Either is indeed nothing but a theory, and it is therefore misleading if the popular literature on practical psychology usually puts overmuch emphasis on the defense of the subconscious mind. This idea of the subconscious mind appeals more easily to the public which is inclined to seek interesting secrets behind the cover of the unconscious, while the theory of the brain dispositions is in better harmony with the scientific facts. For the man of practical interests it is sufficient to un- derstand that all our experiences leave traces in us from which conscious memory-ideas can arise. Whether these traces are mental ideas below the surface of conscious- Memory and Ideas 85 ness or whether they are states of the brain cells is to him of no consequence. ABSTRACT IDEAS Instead of the actual memory of special things we may have general ideas, abstract ideas, of the contents of the world. If I speak to an audience of a hundred persons and I say something about the lot of the workingman, every one of the one hundred may have a different kind of worker in his mind. One thinks of a textile worker and one of a metal worker, one of a mason and one of a plumber, one remembers a single man whose face im- pressed him and another thinks of the picture of a whole mill with hundreds of laborers. Yet, whatever the chance pictures in the mind may be, all the hundred people have the same idea in mind. The one in whose consciousness the idea of textile workers arises has the same general idea of workingmen as the one who thinks of the plumbers, simply because both know that the idea which they have in mind is more than that chance picture which the memory awakes in them. They all feel that any num- ber of possible memories could be substituted. The con- tent of their mind upon which the understanding of the sentence depends is not a concrete idea but a general idea which embraces every possible case. With the help of such general ideas the mind can bring together the material for new and complex thought. If we hear the sentence, * ' The wages of the workingman are dependent upon supply and demand, ' ' each of the words is such a general conception, which involves unlimited possibilities. But by their special combination one definite thought is awakened in consciousness. Each of those words arouses in the mind only those elements which fit together with the other words, and they are 86 Business Psychology then combined into one simple unit. Only by such use of words can the content of our mind endlessly surpass that knowledge which mere perception and memory fur- nish. Each word becomes the central point from which numberless relations irradiate. All our previous experi- ences are condensed in such general combinations of ideas. Yet the mere ideas which the single words suggest are in themselves not knowledge, because a mere general conception does not express any truth. I can have the conception of the "wages of the workingman" and the further conception "dependent upon demand and sup- ply," and yet I may have no facts expressed by them. They become the representation of real facts only by adding the word "are"; that is, by claiming through that word that the one and the other stand in that definite relation. This repeats itself everywhere. To think three plus five or to think of eight or to think of nine is not knowledge, but to think that three plus five is eight and that three plus five is not nine is real knowledge. The connecting " is " or "is not" transforms our mere having of ideas into a real possession of truth. But what is the mental content which is expressed by the "is" or "is not"? That is not a mere image. No, it is an action of ours, an action by which we affirm or deny reality of the content. Every thought contains such an element of our personal approving or disapproving, af- firming or denying. We insist that two contents of our mind belong together or do not belong together. We call such a thought a "judgment." As soon as we have two judgments we can proceed in the same way and can af- firm or deny that these two judgments belong together, and so we can come to a new judgment ; and that we call "reasoning." Through this method we may enlarge the Memory and Ideas 87 circle of our true ideas so that it includes any knowledge of the world, everything which science and scholarship and life experience can furnish. But whatever we know of our personal affairs or of our surroundings or about the universe is in our consciousness composed of the sen- sations and reproductions of sensations and is held to- gether and formed into units by our personal reactions and by our acts of affirmation and rejection. TEST QUESTIONS 1. What part does memory play in answering a business letter? 2. Is imagination a source of knowledge ? 3. What is a hallucination? 4. As a practical proposition, why is it important that actual impressions should be more vivid than memory-images? 5. What are some of the factors to be considered in memory- training ? 6. How do we acquire abstract ideas? 7. In what way do our experiences contribute to our general ideas of the world and its affairs ? PART THREE INTERESTS CHAPTER VIII ATTENTION THE NATURE OF REALITY We have traced the upbuilding of knowledge in our mind. We recognized that this involves more than a mere passive state of mind. Consciousness is not only like a photographic film on which the picture of the world is thrown. The contents of our mind which we call knowl- edge, that is, which involve a possession of truth, de- mand, as we saw, not only impressions but our personal reactions. Even a memory-image becomes a real truth to us when we affirm that what we remember stands for that which happened in the past. But whether we have to deal with perceptions or with memories or with judgments and thoughts we are person- ally bound in our reactions, if we are really aiming toward truth. We cannot arbitrarily change anything; we do not feel free. Certainly it is an act of mine by which I affirm the memory-image of mailing my letter last night. I may now regret that I did mail it, but I am powerless to change the truth, that is, I am bound to link just this memory-image with the real facts. But we are not only bound to affirm our memories; we are no less bound to affirm our correct thoughts. If I sum up my credits and sum up my debits, I may wish that my calcu- lation would bring a better result; but while all this is 88 Attention 89 my own acting and my own doing, yet I am entirely bound and have no freedom to replace the unwelcome figure by a better one, if I want the result of my thought movement to be true. The possession of truth demands our activity, but we are entirely bound in that activity. As soon as we pro- ceed according to our fancy, we have left the realm of knowledge. The world of facts forces itself on our mind and demands that we act in complete submission to stub- born reality. OUB RELATIONSHIP TO REALITY Yet in the midst of this world of facts we stand as per- sonalities with our personal interests. We have to live our individual lives. Our aim cannot be to know the whole truth, that is, to know everything which ever oc- curred in the universe. We need knowledge only of that which concerns us and that which has immediate contact with us and serves our aims and ends of life. Our per- ceiving, remembering, and thinking in which we appear so entirely passive in obedience to the laws of truth must be brought under the control of our own interests, which sift that which refers to our needs from that which is indifferent for us. We cannot change the truth, but we can sift the truth, selecting those parts of the truth which we must consider if we are to fulfill our tasks. The work- ingman must know the details of the machine at which he is working. To know with the same accuracy all the other machines in the country would certainly be additional true knowledge, but it would not help him in the least in earning his wages. The banker surely must have a much wider outlook. He must know not only the contents of his own bank books, but he must know many facts concerning the national and 90 Business Psychology international market; he must know the men with whom he deals and much about industries and resources. Yet even that which he knows is not the trillionth part of the truthful knowledge which he might acquire. While he knows something of the economic facts, he has never studied Egyptian history or differential calculus, and he does not even remember any longer the advertisements over which his eye glanced in last year's newspapers. In short, from the immeasurable quantities of possible true ideas he too and everyone controls by his special interests the selection of the material in consciousness. This brings us to the second great group of processes in the mind. The first contained everything which secured the acquisition of knowledge ; the second must contain the acts by which the contents of consciousness are selected. In the first group everything depends upon the experi- ences from without; in the second everything goes back to the actions from within. There we had to do with the surroundings and here with the personality. NATURE OF ATTENTION The great means of the mind for this end is the mechan- ism of attention. The attention is the central power by which we admit some material and eliminate all the rest. We are occupied by a problem ; its details absorb our at- tention ; all the hundred other engagements are forgotten for the time being. We are writing a letter; all our thought is centered on its content. We may ignore even the conversation around us; we may not hear the noise from the street; we may be unaware of our plans for the rest of the day; everything is removed from con- sciousness and only the question about which we are writ- ing controls our mind. We must consider the various features which are involved in such an act of attention. Attention 91 The aim of every process of attention is to get a stronger hold of the object before us. We want more insight. If it is something which we see or hear or touch, we want more detail, more clearness, more understand- ing. If the object is a thought, an abstract idea, we want to get more of its connections and of its whole setting; we want to draw its consequences, that is, again ; we want to grasp more of that which is contained in it. If we give our attention to a memory-idea, we want to trace every- thing which belonged to it in the past. Our attention is always an inner activity. It prompts us to go beyond that which we possess at the moment, to want to grasp more of it, or to want, at least, to secure its uninterrupted continuation. This activity may be entirely spontaneous, that is, it may result from our own inner wishes and ideas. Or it may be called out by the needs of the situation. In the first case we speak of voluntary attention; in the other case of involuntary. If in a group of men before me I single out one because I have a question in mind which he is to answer, I turn my attention to him because my own idea makes me do so. But if in that group suddenly one turns to me and indicates by gestures that he wants to speak to me or begins to address me, my involuntary attention is drawn to him. THE FOUB ATTENTION PROCESSES VIVIDNESS The act of attention may be said to consist of four dif- ferent processes. First, the object to which we attend be- comes clearer and more vivid in our mind. This must not be confused with a change in the strength or in- tensity of the impression. A color does not become 92 Business Psychology lighter, a tone does not become louder, a figure does not become larger when we turn our attention to it. The change is exclusively one of impressiveness. The whis- pered word, if it attracts our attention, does not grow in strength, but it takes stronger hold of our mind in spite of the fact that it remains much less loud than other words spoken around us to which we do not listen. As soon as this increase of vividness and impressiveness is going on, the details stand out from one another and therefore everything becomes clearer. The more concentrated our attention, the more sharply do we recognize the differ- ences between the various elements. EXCLUSION But this increased impressiveness, vividness, and clear- ness of the attended object in our mind always goes to- gether with the second feature, which is no less essential. It is a negative one. The ideas not attended fade away and lose their impressiveness. To be sure, the workingman can feed his machine with perfect regularity, and yet his thoughts may wander. While he makes his regular arm and foot movements he may think of his family or of poli- tics. But this is possible only because the whole act has become mechanical, or, as the psychologist would say, automatic. He does not really give his attention to the movements which he performs. If some hitch suddenly comes in the machine, he must give his attention to it and at that moment family and politics fade away and disappear from his consciousness. The object of atten- tion does not allow the presence of anything which interferes with its first rights. This negative change is exactly the opposite of the positive change of vividness. It is indeed a decrease in vividness and in impressiveness only. It is not a decrease Attention 93 in strength. If we write a letter while the noise of the factory is around us, the noise does not in the least de- crease in intensity. Its strength remains the same, and only its impressiveness on our mind has gone. It has lost so much in vividness that we are not even aware that it reaches our mind at all ; and yet if the noise of the ma- chines were suddenly to stop or even to become weaker we should notice it at once. The technical term for this suppression of the material which is not attended is "mental inhibition." This inhibition can pass through all degrees. We may even become unaware of a tooth- ache if we are fully absorbed by the startling telegram we just received. Where the demarcation line lies between what we at- tend and what we rule out must depend upon our per- sonal motives. When I enter a mill in conversation with the manager who shows me the establishment, I may be so absorbed by the sight that I inhibit the words which he is speaking, that is, I am inattentive to his conversa- tion, while the room as a whole impresses itself vividly on me. In the next moment it is only one particular cor- ner of the room in which a few girls work around a table which becomes impressive and clear in its details, while all the rest of the room loses its vividness. One instant later even that whole group may lose its hold on my mind and only the face of one girl attracts my attention and the whole room and all the conversation may be lost. How much or how little we are to welcome and to re- enforce and to make vivid can be decided by us before- hand. An illumination engineer who is interested in street lanterns may travel through all Europe and bring home from his trip nothing but the memory of different lighting systems. Whatever cities and streets he passed through, he gave his attention only to that which he 94 Business Psychology wanted to see, as that alone had importance for his pur- poses. An architect might have returned from the same trip without any memory of the lanterns but with most vivid ideas of the fronts of the buildings. A dry goods importer, on the other hand, might have ignored the buildings and the lights and seen only the gowns of the people on the street. We can set our attention before- hand and only those objects for which it is set will come to their strongest impressiveness and clearness, while everything else remains to a certain degree inhibited. "We shall speak later about the individual differences in that respect, but fundamentally everyone can prepare his attention and thus secure a mental state in which cer- tain impressions or ideas or memories become re-en- forced and others excluded. TRANSITION TO ACTIVITY The third feature of the act of attention is the tran- sition to activity. As soon as we focus our attention on something in our surroundings we are ready to act in response to it. All our movements become related to that impressive object, while those neglected and in- hibited impressions are no longer starting points for any action. This is not accidental. On the contrary, as soon as we examine the case more carefully, we discover that this readiness for action is intimately connected with the increase of vividness in the attended and the decrease of vividness in the not attended ideas. This connection is full of importance for our whole mental behavior and to understand it well is an essential condition for true con- trol of our mental life in the interest of our practical tasks. The situation is this: The vividness of the im- pression or idea is itself dependent upon our readiness to act in response to it. An impression takes hold of us Attention 95 if we are prepared to act toward it, and an impression re- mains reduced in its vividness and does not take hold of us if we are unprepared to act, if it finds no response in us. Our preparation for action or suppression of action becomes in this way a preparation for the re-enforcement or the inhibition of the impressions themselves. Our preparation for that which we ourselves are to do is decisive for the impressions which the surroundings will make on us. Our readiness to write a letter makes those ideas which we want to write impressive in our mind. Then the chance impressions which our eye could get through the window do not take any hold on our mind. But if we prefer to look out of the window and are pre- pared for that set of movements, then the ideas needed for the letter- writing will fade away in our mind and any chance happening on the street will attract us, will take hold of our consciousness, and our whole attention will soon belong to the snowballing boys on the street, while the letter at our desk is forgotten. Only from this point of view do we understand that the increased vividness of some contents of the mind is al- ways connected with the decreased vividness of the other contents. The actions are responsible. We cannot per- form two opposite actions at the same time; we cannot write the letter and look out of the window; we cannot sit down and stand up at the same time ; nor can we turn to the right and to the left, or open our hand and close it. Whatever action we perform must exclude the opposite action. The structure of our organism demands that. All our muscles are arranged in pairs. The biceps of our upper arm bends our arm, the triceps stretches it, and the mechanism of our nervous system is so arranged that if the impulse goes to the one, the nervous path of the other is closed. 96 Business Psychology Now we can understand how everything hangs to- gether. As soon as an impression or an idea comes to our mind which finds the paths for action open, this idea be- comes vivid and impressive and leads really to the action itself. But as soon as the impulse to the action is de- veloped, the path for the opposite action becomes closed, and as soon as this opposite path is blocked, the vividness of all the impressions and ideas which would demand action in this blocked path becomes decreased. They fade away. The shading of the world is thus dependent upon our readiness and unreadiness for action. Every new ability to react and to respond by our movements opens to us new fields of interest. The tool which we know how to handle and which we are prepared to use enters into the focus of our attention ; the one which we do not know how to use is an indifferent impression which we ignore. FEELING OF ONE'S SELF IN ATTENTION We may add only one feature to the study of attention. In every act of attention we feel ourselves. The things which we see and hear or which memory carries to our mind but which remain indifferent to us go on in us too. But we do not feel active in them. Only when we fixate something in the visual field, or listen to something in the sound world, or concentrate our mind on a remembered event, or devote our thoughts to a problem, do we feel that we ourselves are active. But this stands in nearest relation to the fact which we have just discussed, namely, that the attended content of mind becomes the starting point for action. As far as the outer world and its objects are concerned the first action is of course the adjustment of the body to the impression. For instance, we cannot give attention Attention 97 to something which we see without turning the eyeballs so that the attended ohject falls into the center of the two retinae, that is, on the fixation points. It needs much training to give attention to something which falls on the side parts of the retinae. The natural tendency is to fixate the attended object, to turn the head to the source of the sound, to strain the muscles of the arm if the finger touches the object of attention. Moreover the whole body enters into a state of tension, as that alone secures the steady position of the sense organs on which we can gain the strongest impression. Even the breathing becomes more regular and somewhat artificial from this general tension. The muscles of the forehead become contracted. These movements, helpful to the purpose of getting the greatest amount of impression, bring the feeling of our own body into prominence, and this feeling, composed of many movement sensations and tension sensations, makes us aware that we ourselves are actively engaged in the process of attention. How TO SECURE ATTENTION We said that the chief motive for the direction of our attention is our preparedness for reaction, and this is controlled by our training and our present ideas. "We see in our surroundings that for which we have set our mind. We did set it by preparing certain reactions. But this does not exclude the strong effectiveness of the outer conditions. We may not have prepared for a definite action. Then we are ready to enter into any response. Not everything will be equally fit to awake our reactions. The sudden stimulus, the very strong impression, the un- usual occurrence will be more effective than the slow, the faint, the customary happening. No one can help giving his attention to the sound of an explosion in his 98 Business Psychology neighborhood. The mere strength of it seems to break open the paths for reaction. But whether the noise of a banging door still really attracts our attention or not will depend upon the habits in our office. While it is true that the customary has little power to stir our attention in comparison with the unusual and startlingly new, we must not forget the opposite, namely, that just the familiar in a strange surrounding must draw our attention most of all. A face which we know holds our attention when it appears in a crowd of strangers. All the unknown faces remain indifferent, because we are not set for a reaction. The one which is connected with our earlier experiences releases reactions for which we are prepared through our earlier acquaintance and this readi- ness to respond gives to the impression its accent in con- sciousness. It becomes vivid and enters into the center of our attention. This leads to a very essential point. Attention can be drawn by breaking into the mind, by startling effects of newness, originality, glaring, loud impressions, and what- not. And yet the safest way and the most effective is that which makes use of the existing dispositions for action. Whoever appeals to the personal experiences, to the habitual inclinations, to the natural interests, to the well-trained responses of a man will draw his atten- tion and, above all, will hold his attention much better than he who starts with entirely new appeals. I can force myself on anyone's attention by suddenly shouting to him, but he will not go on listening to me if my remarks cannot touch levers of natural interest in him and do not refer to anything which makes him internally respond. The larger the groups of associations which my argu- ments stir up, the greater the chance that his attention will remain with me. Each of those association* is a Attention 99 starting point for possible action, and all those wide- open paths for reactions will secure in his mind vivid- ness for every word which I speak. How TO HOLD ATTENTION The holding of attention is indeed very different from the mere awaking of attention. "We saw that we are attentive only as long as all the ideas which would lead to opposite action are inhibited and suppressed. But these ideas suppressed for a moment are soon growing in strength. They push themselves into consciousness and they will get the more chance the less their rivals can really hold our attention by new appeals. The result is the fluctuation of attention which is characteristic of every mind. We cannot keep our attention fully applied to anything for a long time. There are always larger or smaller variations. If we hold our watch so far from our ear that we just hear its ticking and listen with full attention, after a few seconds the sound will disappear. Some seconds later, it will come again, and so it may come and go for a long while. Anyone may try to look at a printed word which interests him. Let him stare at it for five minutes and he will notice that the word begins to crumble, to lose its meaning. He will see only single letters, he cannot keep his attention on the word as a whole word with a meaning. Our attention needs frequent change in order to stir up ever new reactions, as otherwise the opposite reactions would become effect- ive. We keep attentive in a lecture for a whole hour because it is not one single content which demands our attention but every sentence brings new thought. Yet inasmuch as it is after all one group of ideas only which the lecturer brings before us, even there it may be difficult for us to 100 Business Psychology fix our attention in the one direction if that one group of ideas does not appeal to our ordinary activities, and the result is a wandering of our mind. Our attention is suddenly turning away from the topic of the address to some home image and to the work in our office. The opposite reactions have the best chance when the attended impressions begin to fatigue us, especially when bodily fatigue sensations from long muscle work enter the mind. Every fatigue sensation works as a stimulus to stop the work and thus to close the channels of reac- tion. But we saw that as soon as the channels of reaction are closed the impressions themselves become less vivid, less impressive and finally dull and inhibited. Bodily fatigue therefore interferes with our attention. But also without such muscle work purely mental fatigue has the same effect. As soon as the brain center gets exhausted, it becomes unable to produce the necessary reactions and as soon as the reactions stop the sup- pressed opposite reactions find their chance. The at- tended idea fades away and the so far suppressed ideas rush into the mind. We stop being attentive; we are attracted by anything which draws us away. APPLICATION TO BUSINESS These simple facts of attention must play a funda- mental role in the world of commerce and industry. No work can be done in any realm of human endeavor with- out concentrated attention. But work along commercial and especially along industrial lines demands continuity of rather equal attention to an unusual degree. The workingman in the mill, the clerk in the office, the sales- man in the store, the supervisor in the factory may not have to concentrate his attention with the extreme intensity which a scholar or a lawyer or a physician or a Attention 101 politician or a minister needs for a particular act. But he has to hold his attention fixed on his work with very little interruption. He himself and, above all, those who plan the work for him and pay him for his services have accordingly the greatest interest to understand the con- ditions under which attention can be most efficient. A workingman whose attention is constantly drawn away by irregular or rhythmical noises in the factory, a clerk who is constantly disturbed, will never produce the best possible work. But as soon as the eye of the em- ployer is sharpened for the psychological conditions he will easily discover sources of distraction and friction and irritation which are not so much on the surface. On the other hand it will be possible everywhere to create positive conditions which will help the attention. In good light, for instance, the laborer or the clerk or the salesman can see the details of his work with much greater ease than in poor illumination; the more detail he sees, the clearer the visual impression, the more easily he starts the correct reactions, and the more eager must be his attention. But it is not only a question of the outer conditions. We have emphasized that the preparation for action, and that means the previous training and the acquisition of ideas about the work, are most helpful. Nobody can do his best work if he understands it poorly, if he must make too strong an effort to enter into the necessary responses. Moreover we saw that the attention can never be held at an equal level for a long time and that fatigue is always disadvantageous. Thus an alternation between sharp work and light work, between work and recess, becomes essential. Too long working hours, uncomfortable bodily positions, must decrease the efficiency of attention in spite of the worker's best will. I M BARBARA. 102 Business Psychology A characteristic demonstration can be found in the statistical tables which show the industrial accidents, especially in relation to the different hours of the day. The accidents may be called to a large extent a conse- quence of diminished attention. The workingman can avoid the accident if his attention is completely adjusted to the external conditions. As soon as his attention begins to lag he becomes liable to wrong reactions which bring accidents in their train. Statistics show indeed that the largest number of accidents occurs two or three hours after the beginning of the work in the morning and in the afternoon. The detailed figures leave no doubt that the workingman needs at first a certain time for adjustment of his attention, then reaches a good period of sharpest attention and after that begins to get fatigued. But in the last half hour before the end of the morning or afternoon period his attention is once more stirred up by the expectation of the near end. This same fluctuation of attention in long waves can be traced with every continuous worker. The bookkeeper in the office makes in the third hour more mistakes than in the sec- ond. It is needless to say that the speed of the work is a most important factor among the conditions which deter- mine the level of the attention. While fatigue and outer disturbances interfere with the achievement of attention it can be strengthened not only from without by new, intense impressions but also from within by secondary motives, such as hopes and fears. The workingman whose attention may wander when he is paid by the day will hold his attention more firmly to the work of his hands if he is paid by the piece. He is not to be blamed for his apparent carelessness in the first case; he cannot change it. He lacks a motive which whips up the attention at every moment. We shall Attention 103 turn to these problems once more when we come to ques- tions of actions and of efficiency. SO-CALLED MONOTONY IN WORK In popular discussions it is always taken for granted that a chief condition of the undermining of attention is the uniformity of work. If a man, whether he is working at a machine or at a ledger, has to do exactly the same thing from morning till night, his attention must be undermined; it must require an extreme amount of effort to go on with the work. The usual consequence drawn is that the work itself must be an intolerable bur- den and that the monotony, especially of our modern industrial functions, is a source of hardship and suffering in the workingman's life. We are here concerned with the other aspect, that of attention. The psychologist is hardly ready to endorse that popular view. Certainly change is, as we have indi- cated, a possible condition for keeping attention alive. Every new impression makes an appeal to our mental system and pushes us to that action which carries the attention with it. But every new impression also, of course, finds friction. It is difficult to go over to some- thing new. Constant change means constantly new effort which exhausts the mental energies. Uniformity of work must therefore have certain decided advantages for the attention. We said before that our attention is naturally most easily held by that which is familiar to us because then all the responses necessary are prepared beforehand. The impression passes into the channels of the right activity and finds no obstacles in its way. If we have fre- quently gone through a mental or physical operation, every fresh repetition finds us trained and completely 104 Business Psychology adjusted to it and as the action can easily result the impression itself remains vivid and is sure of our atten- tion. The mere uniformity is therefore in itself not dangerous to attention and, as we shall see later, it depends more upon individual tendencies whether fre- quent change or continuity of uniform work is more advisable for the greatest efficiency. INDIVIDUAL, DIFFERENCES The individual differences of attention are, however, not confined to a tendency for continuity or change nor have we a right to speak only of men with good and of men with bad attention. Different personalities may be characterized by different kinds of attention which are all equally good, inasmuch as they may be useful for differ- ent functions. Some persons have the tendency to con- centrate their attention very much, while others are more inclined to a widely expanded attention. Those of the first type will do their best only if they are engaged in work which allows a complete focusing on the one impres- sion or activity at any moment, while the men of the other type may render the best service when they super- vise many things at the same time, perhaps divide their attention among many machines or have a large mass of business details to which to attend. Again we find the differences of those whose attention is best held by visual impressions, those whose whole mental mechanism is most strongly impressed by sounds, and those who are most dependent upon movement sensations or tactual impressions. APPLICATION TO SELLING The interest of the business man in the problem of attention is not confined to the attention of the commer- Attention 105 cial or industrial worker. He is no less concerned with the attention of the customer. For the customer's sake he displays his goods in the shop window and in the store; he advertises his wares in the papers and maga- zines ; he gives significant packings to the manufactured goods, and attaches names and labels to his products. But every display and advertisement and label is an appeal to the attention and is worth while only if it suc- ceeds in forcing the attention in the desired direction. To be sure, it would be very rash to deduce the laws of advertising or display simply from the facts of attention. A shockingly ugly display or a brutally vulgar advertise- ment would draw the attention of the passer-by and of the casual newspaper reader as surely and quickly as a beautiful and harmonious presentation ; and yet it would be badly chosen for its purpose. Other mental factors would work against its effectiveness. We shall speak of some of them later. Many conditions for effective advertising and display- ing and labeling are certainly consequences of the laws of attention which we have mentioned. The surprisingly large object will have more influence in attracting the attention of the customer than the small; the full-page advertisement more than the quarter-page. The brilliant light in the shop window will be more effective than the faint; the unusual type or arrangement or phrasing of the advertisement will force the mind of the reader into the desired channel; the multicolored wrapping or the original picture on the outside of the package will catch the attention in the store; the large piles of the same goods will hold the attention where the eye would have swept indifferently over a few specimens. Movements and sudden changes have an especially strong control over the attention. The quick alternation 106 Business Psychology of light and dark in the electric advertisements which flash out suddenly are therefore well calculated for the fascination of attention, and those which involve the illusion of movement effects are especially compelling. A border around an advertisement, contrasting colors in a poster, a catchy name for a patented article, may give attention value to the most indifferent wares. But it is not only the impression of the moment which is decisive. The advertiser who repeats his advertisement in the same paper for a long while not only hopes to reach the attention of new readers. His chief appeal is to the old ones. The mind which was reached the first time by a good advertisement may not have been impressed at all. The attention is not focused on it and therefore it is for- gotten as quickly as the eye has glanced to the next page. But when the same comes a second time it finds the after- effects of the first. A certain readiness to respond is prepared, the vividness of the impression grows, and, when it appeals to consciousness for the third time, it can reach the climax of effectiveness. EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS All these questions of advertising and labeling, pack- ing and displaying, can be made problems of exact experimental investigation. If we paste simple adver- tisements of similar kinds in a book so that each quarter page contains one, and ten persons have to go through that book so that they devote the same number of sec- onds to every object and immediately after, or after an hour, or after a day, they have to write down the firm names with their advertised articles, as far as they remember them, the experiment shows that the four quarters of the page do not have equal influence on the attention. The advertisements on the upper outer quar- Attention 107 ter are almost twice as often remembered as those on the lower inner quarter. Every detail of the effect of repetition or of size or of arrangement of the advertise- ments can thus be statistically determined and the value for drawing the attention be calculated beforehand. An interesting case, for instance, is furnished by the question of whether it is better to have advertisements mixed with reading matter or not. It seems natural to expect that the advertiser will profit when his display finds space between columns of text, as has recently become the fashion in popular magazines. But the experiment shows that the effect on the attention is greatly diminished when the advertisement is squeezed in between reading matter. We saw that the vividness of the impression is dependent upon the response which we prepare. As soon as we look over a page which awakes the attitude of reading, we are mentally not pre- pared for that entirely different attitude of taking in the contents of advertisements. The one reaction inter- feres with the other, and the result is that the announce- ments on the mixed pages leave a very superficial impression. TEST QUESTIONS 1. What is meant by attention? Is it simply an awareness? 2. What is the distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention ? 3. What are the four attention processes? 4. How do motives influence attention? How do they apply concretely to your own work ? 5. How does attention influence one 's activities ? What prac- tical problems does this suggest for the shop foreman ? 6. How may attention be secured? 7. How may it be held ? 108 Business Psychology 8. What are some of the most common distracting influences iu a factory? In a stenographers' room? Suggest some positive aids to attention in each. 9. What is the relation of attention to industrial accidents? To monotony in work? 10. Are you of the concentrated or of the expended attention type? What kind of work should you be doing? 11. What are some of the applications of this chapter to selling? To advertising? CHAPTER IX FEELING AND EMOTION RELATION TO ATTENTION We have studied the process of attention as the act by which the mind sifts the offerings of the world. Those contents of the mind are attended to of which more clearness, more vividness, more detail, more knowledge of consequences are needed. Everything else becomes suppressed and inhibited. But we must go farther back. What stands behind that mechanism which makes us at- tend one thing and disregard another? We emphasized the importance of actions. We attend that toward which our action is directed and suppress that which would de- mand the opposite action. We made much of the impor- tance of our preparedness for a particular action. Yet we have left out the ultimate spring in our mind which is most effective in getting our action and through the action in getting our attention, namely, our feelings. THE NATTJBE OF FEELING We may at first take the word in its widest sense. Then it means the inner states in which we become aware that an experience is harmonious or disharmonious with our self. If it is harmonious we have the feeling of pleasant- ness, of agreeableness, of satisfaction, of joy, of delight ; if it is disharmonious our feeling is one of unpleasant- ness, of disagreeableness, of pain, of sadness, of torture. We may add at once a characteristic feature. If the ex- 109 110 Business Psychology perience is harmonious with our self, we aim toward its continuation or its strengthening and unfolding; if it is disharmonious we try to break it up or at least to reduce it. If this is the case, we recognize at once the relation of feeling and attention. Every feeling involves an action, this very action to make the experience continue or dis- continue. And we see that everything which is an object of our action becomes from this fact the center of our at- tention. Even the disagreeable impression of which we want to rid ourselves on account of our unpleasant feel- ins: forces itself on our attention and becomes at first more vivid because we concentrate our action on it in order to destroy it. But we must consider the situation in more detail, as surely the process of feeling and its more complex form of emotion stands in the center of our life, and not least in the center of business life. Whatever a man's place in practical life may be he works with the aim to be happy and to enjoy his work and its results and to eliminate the sources of dissatisfaction and un- happiness. Nobody buys and nobody sells but for the purpose of satisfying his feelings. THE NATURE OF SELF We said every feeling is the awareness of harmony or disharmony of an experience with our self. Hence we must first settle the question : What do we mean by our self? What is our personality ? If we say that something is agreeable because it furthers our self, and something is disagreeable because it interferes with our self, we mean, of course, that self which we find in our inner ex- perience. It is not sufficient to characterize it by name and birthday. We must grasp the essential features of the self which we find in our consciousness. It seems the Feeling and Emotion 111 easiest thing in the world to say what we ourselves are, as we surely cannot know anything and anyone better than our self. It is after all the only thing in the universe to which we have immediate access. And yet it is ex- tremely difficult to determine exactly what we mean by our self. Surely the idea of our own personality has never been handed over to us as a complete, ready-made possession. It had a long development. The infant does not know anything of himself as a personality. He plays with his own feet as he would with a toy. The idea of one's own personality grows slowly from the sensations which the body furnishes. The child sees and hears and touches millions of things and among these impressions are those which originate from his own organism. He has the muscle sensations and joint sensations from his arms and fingers, his legs and his trunk, and they melt together with the touch sensations of his skin and with the tem- perature sensations, and as a very important part with the occasional pain sensations, hunger and thirst sensa- tions, tickling sensations, and many others which are bound up with the processes of the body. DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITIES All these sensations cluster together and form a group which quickly gains central importance. First of all, that group always remains present. Whatever the child may see and hear, however often he may change his sur- roundings, the sensations from his own body always re- main at the center. Moreover the child perceives that his body answers his wishes; his arms and his legs be- come the instruments for the fulfillments of his desires. The position and the behavior of his body decide which things he will see or hear or touch. If he opens or closes 112 Business Psychology his eyes, if he tnrns his head to the right or to the left, if he touches things with his fingers, more and more new objects enter his experience. Finally only his body is the source of pain sensations. If the chair tumbles down, he perceives it but it does not hurt, but if he him- self falls he not only perceives it but he feels the pain. All these factors combine in the result that the idea of one's own body becomes the central group of impres- sions and the most important of all which the world awakes in the mind. In this simplest and lowest form the personality is the one body which is the cause of our impressions and the means of our actions. But this idea of personality quick- ly spreads in many directions. We said the body is re- sponsible for the impressions of the individual. If the bodily eyes are closed, no visual impressions come to the mind. It is only a natural step, therefore, to consider all these impressions and ideas of the world as belonging to the body. Our personality is then not only our body but our body together with the perceptions and ideas in it. On the other side the body was the acting instrument. But again this action is controlled by the will-impulses. Hence the personality must be not only the acting body but again the acting body together with the will which starts the movements. The outcome is a richer idea of the personality than the child can really reach. On this level our self is our body, together with our ideas and our volitions which are going on in our body. As soon as the personality idea has reached this stage, it can easily pass through a number of changes in various directions. The one is an enlargement. If the person- ality includes everything by which our relation to the world is determined, then we must allow room for a social expansion. Our pocketbook is then a part of our per- Feeling and Emotion 113 sonality, and so is our name and onr position and the whole system of connections with family and society. Whatever is in our service and helps us to release our volitions then belongs to our personality in the widest sense. This represents our social personality. On the other hand we might concentrate the idea of our personality so that only the essentials are included. In that case it is evident that not our whole body is needed. We do not lose a part of our personality if our hair is cut. Not even our arms and our legs are our real per- sonality. The truly essential part is our brain with the content of our mind. Thus we develop a mental person- ality as against the social personality. Even here in this content of the mind we can draw the line more or less narrowly. In this mental personality the chance knowl- edge is not really significant. We do not lose our self when we lose the memory of some of the names and dates which we learned in school. Just as we do not give up a part of our personality when we cut our finger nails, we do not lose a part of our mental personality if we for- get the time-table which we knew by heart last year. The central group of mental functions, those which we usually call the character and the intelligence and the tempera- ment, the chief dispositions to act and to think, then remain as the true personality. MANY PERSONALITIES nsr THE SELF From this narrowest idea of the self as the center of thought and action to the widest idea of the self as social personality is a long distance, with numberless steps. The idea of our self is constantly changing. At one moment we think of our self as a moral personality for which the character is everything and the physical body something external over which we have control, and at 114 Business Psychology the next moment we think of our self as just such a physical body. And again in the next instant we think of our self as a social personality in the midst of social surroundings. Every situation must demand a special sorting of the elements which we include in our person- ality idea. The more we emphasize the mental side and the social side, the more our personality idea must change under the different conditions. Our body remains the same ; and yet we feel our self as a different person- ality in our office and in the club, at our breakfast table and in the theatre, in church and in the political meeting. In every one of these situations new groups of mental contents and of social relations are in the foreground. Our self is really a different one, because the constant element, the physical body, appears unimportant in such situations, and the mental elements which are decisive are entirely different ones every time. Of course we can secure the consciousness of unity by our memories. The man who sits at his desk in the morning filled with the thought of the business affairs of the day knows that he is the same personality who the night before was in the dancing hall with no other thoughts but flirtation and enjoyment of the waltz. The intellectual and social self-consciousness was entirely different in the two surroundings and their behavior accordingly had also little similarity. Yet the memory-ideas bind them to- gether. In rare cases of disease we find that these memory connections are destroyed. Then a person loses the con- sciousness of identity with the earlier personality. The physician calls it a hysterical splitting of the personality. Sometimes one personality exists alternatingly with another, and neither can remember the other. But in normal life, however many phases and variations of per- Feeling and Emotion 115 sonality a self may pass through, they all are bound together by a distinct remembering, and the result is the unity of personality throughout the development. But if we have many kinds of personalities in us from the spiritual to the organic and from the organic to the social, the question as to what is in harmony or in dis- harmony with the personality must also take manifold character. Then the contrasting feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction must result when any of these many varieties of personality becomes furthered or hindered, The displeasure of a moral pang seems at first not to have anything in common with the dislike of a foul smell or with the indignation over a social affront. But they all are cases of an interference with the personalities, only personalities of very different order. * LAWS OF FEELING The most elementary feelings result from a simple stimulus agreeing or disagreeing with the bodily con- ditions of the organism. The body reacts directly. That which agrees finds in the body a response which works toward the continuation and that which disagrees stirs up the opposite reactions which break off the stimulus. The accompanying mental state with which the impulse starts is the pleasure or displeasure. But if the deciding factor is the agreement or non-agreement with the condi- tions of the body, it is evident that the pleasure or displeasure depends not only upon the character of the impression but still more upon the state of the organic self. Food which tastes delicious when we are hungry would be indifferent when we are satiated and would taste intolerable when we are seasick. But while it is true that even these simplest feelings depend upon our own status and change with the conditions in ourselves, we surely 116 Business Psychology must not believe that this means absence of definite laws for the realm of these simplest feelings. They are not arising by chance or in a whimsical way. The world of feelings has its regularities and its laws as well as the world of impressions. Broadly speaking, every stimulus is pleasant in moder- ate strength and becomes unpleasant in great strength, and between those two is a certain region of indifference or a region in which pleasantness and unpleasantness overlap. The feelings which are attached to the lower senses, touch, temperature, smell, taste, muscle sensa- tions, organic sensations, are more intense than those connected with the higher sensations of eye and ear. Those lower senses have more immediate influence on the body, while the sounds and colors become influential on us less as single elements than as parts of complex ob- jects which do not interest our bodily personality but which appeal to our higher self. Anything too cold or too hot, anything too salty, or anything with a smell of decay has an immediate importance for our body. It interferes with the existence of the bodily personality, awakes an immediate reaction toward stopping that dangerous stimulus, and is therefore distinctly unpleasant. But a disturbing tone or color may to a certain degree interfere with our bodily welfare too, may irritate or disturb the eye or ear, and yet their bodily effect is small as long as the light is not blinding or the sound deafening. The color and the sound, on the other hand, may be- come tremendously important if they are parts of a social scene which we witness or of a spoken sentence. What we see and hear may then hurt us more than any smell or taste could hurt us. But it does not hurt the bodily per- sonality; it strikes on the mental personality, on the intellectual or the moral self, which reacts to stop not Feeling and Emotion 117 that particular color or tone but the whole scene of which they are a part. FEELINGS AFFECTING PHYSICAL WELL-BEING The strongest reactions and accordingly the most in- tense feelings are attached to those influences on the body which directly destroy the bodily substance. They are the sources of pain. Every pain sensation indicates a real harm to the organic substance, and the resulting intense dislike is the great warning signal with which nature provides the human mind. Pain is, accordingly, the most useful element of human consciousness. If the suffering of pain were taken away, man's body would be endlessly more threatened than at present, inasmuch as the body itself takes care by its mental physical reactions to sup- press at once the source of the destructive influence. The organic sensations which lack of food, lack of liquid, lack of fresh air, lack of normal temperature, awake in the mind are in a similar way coupled with strong efforts to overcome the disturbance. Hunger, thirst, and so on are linked with strong feelings. The strongest contrast to pain is the lust sensation which is connected with the activity of the sexual glands. It is not the body itself which is here furthered through the organic process, but the race which is continued by the sexual function. There the individual personality serves as instrument of the race and feels the strongest pleasure in the act which is devoted to the creation of progeny. But the satisfaction of the desire for food and liquid or the healthful, comfortable warmth produces positive sen- sations which are pleasant because the stimulus directly furthers the interests of the body. The same may be said about the pleasure in the moderate activities of walking, running, swimming, and so on. 118 Business Psychology The feeling-differences of the light and sound sensa- tions as isolated impressions are relatively small. Exact experiments can easily show, nevertheless, that such dif- ferences exist. The saturated colors, for instance, are more pleasing than the whitish or dull ones, the unsatur- ated ones. The tones with low overtones are more pleas- ing than those with very high overtones. True richness of feelings connected with sight and sound begins when we turn to the combinations. Two colors each of which is pleasing may give a combination which is utterly un- pleasing ; two tones each of which gives a sonorous agree- able sound may be utterly disagreeable when they are played together. In the field of color we find that the most pleasing effects produced are combinations of com- plementary colors, yellow with blue, red with green, orange with violet, and so on. In the field of sound we have agreeable effects when the tones stand in musical relations, that is, if the relationship of their number of vibrations can be expressed in small figures, as one to two, or two to three, or three to four, or three to five, or four to five, or five to six, which correspond to the chief musical intervals. If the combinations are in space and time, we come to forms or rhythms which command not less distinct feel- ing reactions. A regular repetition of accented sounds, such as the rhythm offered in music or in poetry, a symmetrical arrangement of lights, a well-balanced grouping of forms essential in painting or arts and crafts or architecture, awake strong pleasure, while any neglect of such an orderly arrangement displeases us. Here we can no longer speak of direct furtherance or disturbance of the body. It is a more complex personal- ity which feels in harmony with the regular grouping of the impressions and in disharmony with the disorderly Feeling and Emotion 119 grouping. Yet it is not without intimate relation to our bodily existence. We like a symmetrical arrangement to the right and left which balances simply because it harmonizes with our bodily structure. That which is equally developed on the right and on the left side awakes in us impulses and imitative reactions which correspond to the needs of our own balance. If one side of a picture were strongly developed and the other not it would force on us the feeling of tumbling over to one side. We should feel it as in disharmony with the conditions of our own equilibrium. We never demand that the upper half of a picture cor- respond to the lower because in our bodily self the func- tions of our upper half are entirely different from those of the lower. We demand stability for the lower and freedom of movement for the upper half. Symmetry be- tween the upper and lower parts would be directly dis- harmonious with the conditions of our own life. But we do demand indeed that the right and the left balance. This, of course, does not mean that in a picture the right and the left half must be strictly symmetrical. We need only an equality of impulses. In a poster a large figure on the one side may very well be balanced by a wide vista or a heavily printed description of the article on the other side. Each would give equally strong impulses to activ- ity, would bring both sides of our personality equally into action and would therefore be felt as pleasing, while the figure and inscription both on the same side would con- tradict the needs of our organic personality. The rhythmical grouping, too, corresponds to our im- mediate organic needs. Every accent demands a certain tension in our responses, which is followed by relaxation. If the accents follow one another irregularly, the bodily impulses become irritating and interfere with one an- Business Psychology r. Our whole organism enters into a state of unrest which disturbs our normal breathing and all the other regular functions. We cannot adjust ourselves and feel it as most unpleasant. From these simple starting points we can go to richer and richer aesthetic experiences in >i>nee and time, in color and sound and touch, and we find everywhere conditions of the organic personality essen- tial for our aesthetic appreciation. COMPLEXITY AND VARIETY OF FEELINGS But the more we come to complex conditions, the more associations, ideas, memories, and thoughts enter into the pleasant or unpleasant experiences. They no longer refer to the bodily personality. It is the intellectual and voli- tional self which comes into the foreground with them. But the principles remain the same. The amount of pleasure depends upon the degree with which the ideas harmonize and agree with the various parts of the per- sonality. To see an old friend again, or to get a raise in salary, or to be successful in the discovery of an improve- ment in the shop, or to break the routine office work by an outing to the country, is a pleasure, but it has nothing to do with the bodily self. Each such experience harmo- nizes with the whole mental personality. In a correspond- ing way the news of the illness of a friend, or the loss of money, or a failure in an application for a position, or a disappointment in a speculation, is a source of dis- pleasure. Each of these experiences interferes with the per- sonality ; and yet again not the bodily but only the mental and social personality is involved. The fundamental con- trast between the pleasure and the displeasure is the same as in the bodily realm. The difference between the pleasure in a financial gain and the displeasure in a loss Feeling and Emotion 121 is the same as the difference between the pleasure in a good taste and the displeasure in a bad taste. The agree- able is always that experience which the self accepts as harmonious and the continuation of which it welcomes, while the disagreeable is that intrusion which the self rejects. Yet while this fundamental difference of the contrast between welcoming and rejecting is the same for the whole world of feelings, each particular set gives its special traits to the feeling. We have therefore a per- fect right to say, as is often said, that there exist only two feelings, pleasure and displeasure, and yet we may with the same justice claim that there are numberless feelings. The pleasure in a color is not the same as the pleasure in a tone, and neither are the same as the pleasure in a friendly word or the pleasure in a successful sale or the pleasure in a great invention. If we consider that every pleasure or displeasure in- volves the release of those actions by which the con- tinuing or the stopping of the experience is attempted, we can well understand that the great variety of neces- sary actions for this purpose must give numberless shades to our feelings. If something approaches me and I foresee an interference, the unpleasantness of the con- tact may lead me to avoid the disagreeable result, but I may do this by attacking the object with the aim of de- stroying it or J may do it by running away in the hope of escaping it. The displeasure which breaks out into move- ments of attack and the displeasure which leads to flight may be characterized by the same impulse to avoid the object; and yet the total difference of the actions which are to serve the effect must give entirely different experi- ences to the mind. In a very similar way I may proceed to secure the continuation of the pleasant contact either by actively 122 Business Psychology approaching the welcome source or by passively giving myself over to its influence. Even in the simplest cases where the relation to the self is one to the bodily per- sonality the reaction may be sufficiently different to bring threat variety into the feelings themselves. The dis- >ure in a slight toothache and in a slight headache may have much similarity, but the displeasure in the headache is very different from that in a foul smell, how- ever disagreeable both may be, because the impulse to- ward the two sources of discomfort must be so unlike. As soon as we come to the more complex influences where not a helpful or dangerous, comfortable or disturb- ing, physical thing is present, but where the source of the feeling is a scene or a word, a situation or a piece of news, the reactions must become still richer in variety. The reactions to an insulting word and to the news of the ticker that our stocks are going down are entirely different, however equally unpleasant the impressions may be. The affront wounds our social personality with its ideas of justice and of respect which we expect from our neighbors. The other interferes with that entirely different social personality which is composed of our plans to secure our wishes by financial means or to safe- guard our future. But as soon as we undertake to consider these com- plex cases we must at once be aware that many other con- ditions for a rich variety are given. Some experiences demand a quick reaction, others a slow reaction some are instantaneous, others refer to more or less lasting circumstances; some contain all essential elements in themselves, and others awake large masses of memories and expectations. Some turn the mind toward the past, others to the present, and again others to the future; some refer to lifeless nature, and others to our social The kymograph is an instrument used to represent graphically certain facts and conditions which have a bearing upon mental life. The kymograph in the center of the table has for its chief part a revolving cylinder covered with smoked paper. The various levers which are in contact with it make a graphic record of their up and down movements. The cylinder shows a number of such white lines written by the levers. These levers are moved by the pressure of air in littlo air boxes which are in connection with rubber tubes. As soon as air is pressed into the rubber tubes, the levers move. The experiment shows one such rubber tube connected with the chest of the experimenter. A pneumograph is adjusted to his chest by which every act of respiration changes the air pressure. At the same time a sphygomo- graph is attached to his left wrist. The beating of the pulse produces in it similar air movements. Both pulse and breathing are studied in this experi- ment in their dependence upon mental acts. Feeling and Emotion 123 companions, and again others to ourselves and our deeds. We can have the feeling of enjoyment in contact with nature, but the feeling of gratitude only in contact with human beings. We can have regret only with regard to the past, and hope and fear only with regard to the fu- ture. We may even have complex feelings in which we include the feelings of others. Our envy is our displeas- ure in the pleasure of others ; our malice is our pleasure in the displeasure of our neighbors. ORGANIC RESPONSE TO FEELINGS The experience of pleasure and displeasure from the harmony or disharmony with our self varies, however, not only in the manifold contents of the situation and the immediate action by which we prepare the going on or ending of the event. Another very important source of variations exists in the accompanying responses of our organism. The broker's feeling of joy in discovering the sudden rise of his stocks is not characterized only by the welcoming attitude of his self, but at the same time his heart begins to beat more strongly and quickly, his breathing changes, his face becomes flushed, his move- ments become more rapid and more elastic. If instead the stocks had gone down, he would have become pale, his movements would have become weak, his whole body would have lost .energy, perhaps even tears would have entered his eyes. Almost every feeling, especially a strong one, has characteristic accompaniments in the bodily sphere, and these accompanying processes neces- sarily become the sources of sensations which form a background for the feeling in consciousness. The flushing face in which the blood vessels are dilated and the pale face in which the blood vessels are con- tracted give a different kind of feeling. The strong 124 Business Psychology tension of the muscles or that disheartened relaxation of (he muscles gives an entirely different sensation which shades the whole feeling of personality. Laughing and Hg and trembling, doubling the fist and gritting the teeth, and many similar physiological processes enter into the experience. The inner organs too are affected. Distress and worry ruin the appetite; the stomach does not produce its normal secretions ; even the saliva glands do not work. Other feelings produce an abnormal activ- ity of the kidneys or of the liver. In short, the whole organism reverberates when strong furtherances or inter- ferences with the personality become effective. They have their indirect influences on the whole rhythm of mental behavior. In a state of grief and depression the associations are inhibited; no new ideas enter the mind. In a state of exaltation and inspiration and great enjoy- ment the ideas rush freely to consciousness. NATURE OF EMOTIONS Only when the feelings are accompanied by such bodily changes and their effects on the mind are we accustomed to speak of emotions. Thus in the center of every emo- tion we have a satisfaction or a dissatisfaction, but this core of feeling is surrounded by an abundance of other elements which give character to the subjective state. Some acts and bodily expressions may be the inherit- ance of old racial experiences, some are probably only an overflow of excitement or the result of a stopping of normal excitement. But there is one aspect of these emotions which is extremely important. The value of the emotion as against the simple feeling lies in the fact that through this participation of the whole body the per- sonality is concentrated on the one line of action. The interests and the attention of the self become focused on Feeling and Emotion 125 the one center of emotion. Everything else which was going on in our mind is swept away. The thousand little thoughts and cares which were with us are forgotten ; the one great source of enthusiasm or of anger holds our whole mind and presses all our resources into the service of the one great act toward the goal which awakes our enthusiastic response, or into the fight against the op- ponent who made us angry. The emotion is thus the useful means of re-enforcing the feeling-appeal. The source of the feeling is no longer a mere chance experi- ence which allows many other experiences besides, but it takes hold of our total personality and releases thereby energies which would not be awakened by an ordinary feeling. The emotion is the great appeal which mobilizes all our energies. AESTHETIC FEELINGS "We may give attention still to only one group of feel- ings, the aesthetic feelings with which the beautiful ob- ject impresses us. We ought rather to say that we call beautiful the object which awakes in us aesthetic feeling. What are its characteristics I Surely it is a feeling of pleasure. Yet the beautiful is more than the merely agreeable. In an essential way it is even its opposite, because the agreeable is that which we want to make use of; we want to eat the agreeable food. The truly beau- tiful, in the higher sense of the word, inhibits in us the impulse to possess the object. We want to enjoy the sight of it, but we do not want the object itself. We do not embrace the beautiful statue of Venus; we have no appetite for the painted fruit. True art must so show us everything that we are unwilling to act toward it. It is a pleasure in which the impulse to action is completely suppressed. We do not want to sit down with the people 126 Business Psychology on the stage ; that drama is closed in itself and we do not want to mix in. We enjoy the comedy, but we do not participate in the joy of the persons in the play. Nor do we hate the villain in the melodrama. The beautiful ob- ject is thus detached from our personal desires, while every merely pleasant object is the goal of our personal wishes. This must, of course, not be confused with our desire to possess, for instance, a beautiful painting or statue. The artistic work which we possess is a piece of canvas with oil color or a piece of marble. They have, as such, only economic value, and the pleasure which we gain from their possession is not the pleasure which we gain from their beauty. We desire the picture because we want to have it on our wall in order to enjoy its beauty whenever we wish. But this enjoying of the beauty is a pleasure which excludes any desire for the subject of the picture. The aesthetic emotion which detaches us from the source of our happiness and brings our practical actions to rest, accordingly, plays a role of its own, different from all the other feelings of happiness and joy which are based on personal interests. We said that every pleas- ure results from the harmony of the object with the per- sonality. This pleasure is not selfish ; a higher spiritual personality is involved which is common to everyone who grasps the ideals of beauty. Every other kind of pleasantness is dependent upon the chance conditions of the personality; one likes cigars and another does not; one enjoys sweets and another hates them. But beauty is enjoyable for everyone who possesses an aesthetic per- sonality at all. Yet the beautiful is not the only experi- ence which satisfies the ideal personality. We must couple with it the true and the moral. Truth and moral- ity bring satisfaction too. Yet again it is not an indi- Feeling and Emotion 127 vidual personality which profits from them and enjoys them. There is no personal, selfish interest felt when we enjoy a noble, moral deed. Our spiritual personality is satisfied. Everything which brings pleasure and is thus in har- mony with the personality is for that personality a value. Those sources of pleasure which appeal to the spiritual personality, the beautiful, the true, the moral, are the ideal values, or, as we may also call them, the eternal values, since they are independent of the chance condi- tions in time. The knowledge which is really true must be true forever and for everybody. All the other values refer to the particular personalities. The satisfaction which they bring is limited. The values which are de- pendent upon the special personalities which receive them are the goods. The business man has to do with these goods only. He furnishes the world and distributes in the world the objects which are in harmony with the needs of the personalities. The physical personality, the mental personality, the social personality, each welcomes the objects which are in harmony with its conditions and which are therefore pleasant, agreeable, and delightful. Everything which is contrary to the conditions of the personality is rejected, therefore appears disagreeable and unpleasant, is there- fore not a good, and is not fit to enter into the economic circulation. The feeling interests of the personalities remain the ultimate cause for the whole economic inter- play. Whatever industry and commerce create and set in motion must awake pleasant feelings in someone. The goods have to pass through many stages and change hands many times before they reach the personality in which that ultimate satisfaction and pleasure are secured. This is possible by the introduction of money, which in 128 Business Psychology itself has no value and is unfit to give pleasure by its own substance, but which by social agreement can be substi- tuted for any possible economic good and becomes the standard for the pleasure value of all of them. THE FEELING OF VALUE The feeling of value of the goods to be purchased must for this reason also become the decisive element in the advertisements. We have spoken of those factors in the advertisements which simply draw the attention and try to hold it and impress the announcement on memory. But it is still more essential that it awake the feeling of pleasantness, of agreement, of sympathy, making the pos- sible purchaser wish that the advertised object may agree with his personality. Certainly the personalities differ. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor, city peo- ple and country people, men with interest in sport, or in books, or in music, or in travel, or in politics, represent very different dispositions for pleasure and sympathy. Moreover we have seen that every individual can come in question sometimes as a bodily, sometimes as a mental, sometimes as a social personality. Thus the advertise- ment must be carefully adjusted; but some kind of per- sonality in the reader must feel that the offered goods are in agreement and harmony with its setting, or the ad- vertisement will be in vain. The first step to this triumph over the feelings of the reader will be taken by the merely formal means which secure a general feeling of pleasantness. The well-pro- portioned arrangement of the advertisement, the charm- ing colors used in the poster, the appeal to humor, the gracefulness of the drawing, the politeness of the lan- guage, the originality of the make-up, all will have not only the effect of drawing and holding the attention but Feeling and Emotion 129 much more of bringing the spectator into that comfort- able mood in which any news is received with a certain willingness. Where the opposite is the case, where colors are harsh, the arrangement clumsy, where it is difficult to read the text, or where the words are trivial or stale, the personality has a general feeling of discomfort and re- ceives any content as a kind of interference with the per- sonal attitude. Even the most attractive offer would have an uphill fight to make under such circumstances. Yet this appeal to the general feeling of pleasantness is not sufficient to sell the goods. It only prepares the way for the feeling effect which the content of the an- nouncement tries to awake. The personality feels at- tracted because the object suggests an appetizing flavor, or gives a feeling of safety, or promises elegance and fashionable distinction, or great economy, or improve- ment of health, or personal beauty. Often the social per- sonality feels itself furthered by the thought of buying that which is used by well-known persons or which has the approval of public opinion. Where it is fitting, the ap- peal to the parents ' love for their children, or to patriot- ism, or to religious faith, or to confidence in scientific results will be sure to supply economic value to the advertised goods. Psychological experiments in which advertisements with different feeling appeals were graded by twenty men and twenty women showed as average that the idea of health appeals to the personality most Strongly, next comes that of cleanliness, then of scien- tific justification, then of timesaving, of appetite, of the desire for efficiency, of safety, of durability, of high qual- ity, of modernity, and so on. Where no element of the personality welcomes or rejects an offered good, no feel- ing is stirred up, a state of indifference exists, and nothing can induce the reader to purchase the object, as 130 Business Psychology the purchase means the sacrifice of money, and this money involves the giving up of some opportunity to secure the sources of pleasant feelings. THE VALUE OF PLEASURE IN WORK We have spoken so far only of the feeling of value which the final product produces and which indeed gives ultimate meaning to all industrial and commercial trans- actions. Nobody would manufacture any goods and no- body would distribute them in the world if they had not finally value of satisfaction for some personality. The moral man performs the good and noble deed for its own sake. If no man sees it, God sees it. It is done because it is good. But in the economic world nothing is done for its own sake. If taste changes and no one any longer has pleasure in a certain thing, no factory will turn it out and no department store will handle it. But while the pleasure in the commercial goods must be the normal condition for the whole process, we must not overlook that this alone is not the only point at which the indus- trial and commercial life come in contact with the psy- chology of feeling. Nobody would manufacture and sell silk stockings or graphophones, or would raise oranges, or would fish for lobsters, if there were not people in the world to whom the wearing of the stockings, and the listening to the graphophones, and the tasting of lobsters gives some pleasure. Their enjoyment is the spring of the whole transaction. But to perfect the stockings, to weave them and to dye them, to distribute them to the retailer and to sell them to the girl who wears them, involves the activity of hundreds who have to co-operate in a most complex way and of whom not one shares the enjoyment of wear- ing that pair of stockings. The grower who picks the Feeling and Emotion 131 oranges in his California orchard picks them in order, that the New Yorker may enjoy them at his breakfast table. He himself does not consume his fruit which he sells and those hundreds who are engaged in its trans- portation and who carry the oranges from the Pacific to the Atlantic or who sell them in the grocery store cannot feel the pleasure in the taste of the juicy fruit. Yet no one of them would have an interest in his activ- ity and therefore would not be willing to raise a hand in that complex transaction if there were not something which satisfied him and which gave him a pleasure feeling in exchange for his contribution. The workingmen who weave and dye the stockings and the salesmen who spread them out on the counter must link these activities with some pleasure, just as much as the final purchaser of the goods couples pleasure with their use. The mere phys- ical activity of tending the machines in the textile mill or the running about as traveling salesman to the shops can- not be in itself the incentive. In so far as it is fatiguing and connected with hardships it even awakes unpleasant feelings which, as we saw, tend to stop the source of the discomfort. Workingman and salesman would therefore give up the work if their disagreeable sensations were not outbalanced by stronger sources of pleasantness. These are, of course, given in the wages for their work and in all the secondary agreeable features of their in- dustrial or commercial position. Hence the essential effort must be to adjust all business life so that the pleas- ant feelings are stronger than the unpleasant feelings in everyone who contributes to the great process by which the pleasant object is finally brought to the purchaser. The subtlest balancing and the most careful grading of the pleasures are always needed. High wages may be less pleasant than lower ones if the higher ones are uncertain 132 Business Psychology and the low ones certain and steady. Nor will the high wages alone be decisive if they go together with working conditions which interfere with the enjoyment of good health or with the pleasure in sympathetic human rela- tions or if they are coupled with excessive fatigue from the work itself. In every case the relation to the needs of the personality will be the controlling factor. The pleasures which the captain of industry or the great merchant or the banker derives from his work will have very different sources from those which feed the emotional life of the workingman, but the situation as a whole is the same. Their mental personality is composed from other factors and the processes which agree or dis- agree with their personality are therefore different. But the harmony or disharmony with the energies of the per- sonality remains here too essential. Such a leader of business life enjoys not only his financial income but his power over the market, his social standing, the luxury at his command, his influence on public affairs. All these social effects are necessary for him to maintain that feel- ing of vitality which forms the core of the self. Wher- ever these feelings respond the desire to work toward the continuation and strengthening of their sources must result. Where the conditions are unfavorable for the inner development of the personality, where disappoint- ment sets in and worry follows, where failure comes and loss, the emotional reverberation of distress and grief interferes with the energetic activity. IMAGINATION The higher the life work the more the pleasure, and the resulting interests are independent of the momentary impressions and are linked with the whole situation, in- cluding what the future may bring. The simplest work- Feeling and Emotion 133 ingman reaches a higher level if he does not ask only for the pleasure in the wages of the day, but also considers his future and the joy or misery to which his life may lead him. The joy in the gifts of the future can be far stronger than the satisfaction in the offerings of the present. Here lies the spring of the power of imagina- tion. Through imagination a possible joyful achieve- ment of the future is anticipated in the mind and the pleasure in this hoped-for effect becomes the moving force for the inner life. The inventor holds before his mind an unsolved problem, anticipating the joy which its solution will bring him in the future. This joy has stronger hold on him than any suffering or deprivation which he must undergo in the pursuit of his distant goal. His personality is widened so as to include all those pos- sible coming experiences. He does not feel the hunger of today because he is thrilled by the glory of the future achievement. These joys of the imagination can enter into every life, the humblest as well as the noblest. Everybody's imag- ination can turn to possible improvements and develop- ments toward which his efforts are directed. No business life is really successful which is not aided by some kind of imagination. Nobody lives from the satisfactions of the present only. Anticipated joys of the future are the chief motives to action. Every successful life is, after all, a life with a life plan. Only where strong feelings are attached to the ideas of worthy ends can the whole work be organized for true achievement. The action of the attention is only a means in the service of feeling. Feel- ing alone is the true incentive to action. But this indi- cates that a true understanding of the mind at work ia possible only if we consider the activities of the mind aa well as its knowledge and its interests. 10 134 Business Psychology TEST QUESTIONS 1. What effect do feelings have upon attention? 2. What do physicians mean by the hysterical splitting of the personality? 3. What are some of the most elementary laws of feeling ? 4. What is meant by symmetry in objects? Why does the absence of it produce a disagreeable effect? 5. How does the body itself respond to feelings? Describe the bodily reactions of a business man who has just received joyful news. 6. How do the aesthetic feelings benefit a business man ? 7. How do the needs of the physical, mental, and social personalities differ? 8. How does the advertiser use the feeling of value in his ad- vertisements ? 9. How do you increase your pleasure feeling in your own work? 10. How does imagination enrich life? PART FOUR ACTIVITIES CHAPTER X IMPULSE AND WILL THE COMPLEXITY OP THE WILL Every human function which has economic significance must culminate in action. Thoughts or wishes, feelings or emotions, impressions or memories, which have no in- fluence on an external action are entirely irrelevant for practical life. To be sure, the action need not be a move- ment of the arms or legs, the turning of a wheel, or the carrying of a package. The writing of a letter, the speak- ing of a sentence, even the turning of the head, or the directing of the eyes to a certain point may be the total outer effect. The nodding of the head may complete a big business transaction. The writing of a figure on a check may decide upon the economic results of a lifetime. Somehow every mental process which has commercial or industrial interest must end in such an action and that means in some muscle contraction. We are accustomed in popular language to refer all such actions to our will. It is our will which makes us say "yes" or "no," which makes us take up this or that work, which writes our letters, and makes us buy or sell, undertake an enterprise or carry it out. But such a reference to the will may easily mislead. It suggests that there is one mental power in the center of our mind which decides in an autocratic way what is to happen. Such a 135 136 Business Psychology will-power does not exist any more than a special memory-power or perception-power. We have millions of perceptions in seeing and hearing whatever occurs; we have millions of memory-images in experiencing the reproduced mental states. And it is nothing but a word if we take all these perceptive processes together and call them the products of perception, and bring together all the remembered experiences and call them the products of memory. The real thing is not one memory, but mil- lions of memory-reproductions. In exactly the same way, the real thing is not will but the millions of volition processes which go on in us. Each one arises from the special mental conditions, not through the agency of one general will behind it. Our mind is not an autocratic monarchy but a republic in which each indi- vidual volition has its complete responsibility. Then the word "will" serves only as a general label for all the manifold acts of volition. Our problem is accordingly not, what will is, but what the characteristic traits of all the volitional acts are. Under what conditions do we call an act of ours a will-act? Certainly not every movement which our muscles per- form under the influence of our mind is a real will-act. On the contrary, the more earnestly we study actual hap- penings the more we must recognize that far the largest part of our movements is performed without any real will-experience. Moreover, if we trace the processes back to the beginning of our individual development, we discover that the will is anyhow a late development and that the child performs complex acts before the will makes its appearance. We are too readily inclined to be trapped into a wrong conclusion. We find that our will can produce an action, and we draw from that the entirely misleading idea that wherever an action is performed Impulse and Will 137 by us our will must stand behind it. The right idea, which is becoming more and more familiar to the modern psychologists, is backed by a very different set of facts. We know today that every impression, perception, or idea has in itself the tendency to be transformed into ac- tion. Yes, we may say that this is the fundamental thought of our present-day psychology. According to the older view, psychologists treated the sensations or perceptive ideas or memory-ideas or thoughts as if the processes were completed when our mind took hold of them. An idea, a thought, a memory, is experienced and that is the end of it. It seemed only an accidental affair if afterward there arose an impulse to act in accordance with that thought or memory or per- ception. The impulse to act and the resulting muscle contraction appeared as an appendix which was super- fluous for the development of the idea. Those percep- tions and memories might fill the mind and might excite the sensory centers of the brain without any contact with those spheres of the personality in which the doings of man are generated. THE UNITY OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL ACTS Today we should say that such a separation of idea and action is entirely artificial. They belong most intimately together ; the one cannot exist without the other. An ac- tion which is not guided by ideas, if we use the word in its widest sense, would be useless and meaningless. It would be a haphazard muscle contraction without adjust- ment to the surrounding world, which we know through our perceptions and thoughts. But the ideas without actions would be no less superfluous for the welfare of the personality and all the facts which we know indicate that such detached ideas have no real existence in our 138 Business Psychology world experience. From the first instant of human life impressions lead directly to actions. The nervous circuit in the brain does not find an end station in those sensory centers to which the sense organs send their messages. Those sensory centers are only way stations and the ex- citement is carried on to the motor centers in the brain from which the impulses lead to the muscles. The baby who swallows the sweet milk or still earlier begins life with crying in the cold air performs char- acteristic actions which are the necessary result of the given nervous connections. The sweet and warm taste stimulation of the tongue by the milk reaches the brain and the excitement in the brain is accompanied by the sweet and warm sensations. These awake directly, with- out any mixing in of will or decision, those motor brain centers which send impulses to the muscles of mouth and throat by which sucking and swallowing are performed. The child perceives this transition of the brain-action into the movements by which the warmth and sweetness will be continued as a feeling of pleasure ; and finally he perceives the action itself, the sucking and swallowing movements which furnish the mind with the correspond- ing movement sensations. Thus the infant becomes aware of every part of the process from the first contact of the tongue with the milk to the last useful action by which this contact is continued. If, just to reverse the situation, instead of the warm milk some bitter fluid is applied to the lips of the child, as has been done by physicians for experiment's sake, in the very first minutes of life the brain responds in a use- ful manner. It switches the excitement not into the centers for swallowing and sucking, but into the opposite ones for rejecting the dangerous substance, withdrawing the lips, throwing out what has entered the throat, and Impulse and Will 139 closing the mouth. The accompanying mental process is a feeling of displeasure, as the mind always feels dis- pleasure when the brain develops those actions by which the stimulus is discontinued, and finally the perception of the rejecting response itself. The nervous brain tracts are thus from the beginning prepared for the most useful reactions. To be sure, the circle of stimuli for which the brain of the baby is pre- pared is very small, because very few chief paths are completely developed. But every month brings new brain passage-ways. At first the child responds only very clumsily by his eye movements to light impressions. Soon this reaction becomes accurate. The light, which excites a certain spot in the retina, is led to the brain not to end there as a light sensation, but to strike on the motor center which leads to the exactly appropriate reac- tions of the eye muscles. The eye turns toward that light so that the light falls on the center of the retina and gives the sharpest possible image. In a similar way the tactual sensations and visual sensations lead to grasping move- ments. The child stretches out his arm for the toy, but also for the moon. The action is not performed with a particular will, but in an entirely automatic way. AUTOMATIC ACTIONS Let us call those actions in which the impression or idea of an outer situation leads to an action without the conscious interfering or interposing of a special will, ' ' automatic actions. " Then the question arises : To what extent do such automatic actions occur in our ordinary life? We insisted only that our life begins with them. But is the situation such that these automatic actions are forms of activity which occur only in the undeveloped mental mechanism of the child, but which are overcome 140 Business Psychology as soon as a higher stage of fuller development is reached? Is man's life cleared from such merely auto- matic reactions? Are they replaced in his activities by the actions of the will? Certainly not. On the contrary the automatic actions also remain in the adult and the most highly developed mind as the typical forms of hu- man behavior. True will-actions make up by far the smaller part of our responses to the world. The workingman who stands before the machine with which he is familiar may have to perform a dozen different actions one after another in response to certain signals from the moving parts. He sees the turning of a wheel or hears a click and he imme- diately reacts with a correct and useful muscle contrac- tion. He does not exert any special will-effort to do the right thing and to choose it among many possible wrong things. The one impression automatically awakes at once the impulse to the one action which is fit. When his work is over and he goes home, he may have to take many a step and make many a turn through the streets from the factory door to the threshold of his house; and yet he does not move his legs on the street by special will-actions. He may not even give any at- tention to them. He may be absorbed in his thoughts or may be talking with the friend who accompanies him. Yet his walking home is not done without consciousness. He escapes passing automobiles, he takes the right turn every time in response to what he sees and hears and to the tactual impressions which his feet receive. But even if he talks with his friend on the way home, are not most of his remarks and answers probably speech movements of simply automatic character ? If his friend approaches him with the question whether he is going home, he an- swers "yes," and if he asks him whether he has seen the Impulse and Will 141 paper, he answers "no," and if he asks what the name of the man who passed them is, he replies with the name ; his answers come just as automatically as the movements of his feet in response to the optical impression of the street. But it may be different. If he has the intention not to go home, but to the next saloon, he may have reasons not to tell his acquaintance. Then a more complex mental state arises. The automatic reply would be, "No, I am going to stop at the saloon. ' ' But before that impulse is carried out, an association arises, an idea of a social dis- advantage resulting from that answer, and this asso- ciated idea will automatically lead to the suppression of the first impulse and to the opposite impulse of covering his intentions by the claim that he is going home. Then the two possible answers will be before his mind, one con- nected with the idea of social discomfort, the other with the idea of truthfulness. A rivalry between the two be- gins ; secondary ideas cluster around them. Finally one of the two possible answers will be given, but whichever it is, it is given with a conscious will, with an inner de- cision, with a feeling of responsibility, with a state of mind in which the action is no longer automatic. WELL-ACTIONS We can generalize this. We have a will-action before us only when the end to be reached is somehow in our consciousness before the action itself proceeds. The idea of the end to be reached may be vague and loose and indistinct in our consciousness, but somehow it must have entered our conscious mind before we perform the de- cisive steps of the action itself if we are to value the action as a product of our own will, as against the merely automatic performance. But now we see from this 142 Business Psychology most trivial illustration why we have a right to put so much emphasis on the difference between a will-action and an action without a specific will element. We see that only the cases in which the idea of an end is in us before the act is gone through offer us a chance to stop the action and to do something else. Of course the automatic action too is the product of our personality, as it is dependent upon the connections which are formed in our personal brain-system. But as long as our brain acts without bringing up the idea of the end before the action, we have no chance to bring forward all those associations and ideas which may warn us against the performance and its consequences. Only where the idea is in us beforehand and all our memories, and knowl- edge, and thoughts can enter into play, can we really say that we ourselves are responsible for the choice of our action. We foresaw and accepted the consequences and we did not interfere with the process. We did it in free- dom ; we could have done otherwise, that is, we could have put the whole weight of our attention on those opposite ideas which would have stopped the action and which would have freed us from its consequences. The con- scious thinking of the end before the movement is car- ried out indeed makes the greatest difference in the world in our actions. ABNORMAL ACTIONS We throw light most directly on the situation if we compare our normal action with abnormal situations. The mind which is in an abnormal condition experiences will-impulses like any normal mind. Even the idea of the end may come normally into consciousness but somehow the mental mechanism is disturbed and the associations are absent or are not effective ; in short, something inter- Impulse and Will 143 feres with the regular procedure. Therefore we have no right to consider the action as free and to make the actor himself responsible for his deeds. The patient who suf- fers from fever delirium is not responsible if he throws himself out of the window. His mind does not bring to him the normal idea of the danger. He is unable to inhibit the impulse and his feeling leads directly to the dangerous act. It is not an act of suicide which he com- mits, because it is not really his whole self which is act- ing. He is not responsible. The paranoiac who shoots at anyone against whom he believes himself to have a grievance belongs in an asylum, not in a prison, because his brain mechanism is destroyed. There is no normal interplay between the various ideas which lead to action and the opposite ideas which check the action. The thought of killing the supposed enemy is automatically transformed into this act of violence. Even the drunken man is not responsible for his action. Perhaps he answers a word which he dislikes with a vehe- ment insult or with a blow. In a normal state the idea of such an end to be reached would have forced itself on his consciousness with all its dangerous social conse- quences. This idea of the danger and unfitness would have been sufficient to paralyze the motor impulse. But as soon as the actor is under the influence of alcohol, those mechanisms in the brain which could inhibit the actions are temporarily paralyzed. The inhibitory power is checked and the result is that the action of speaking the insult or of striking the blow is rashly carried out. DEVELOPMENT OF WELL-ACTION'S We can easily understand how in the child's life this more complex process begins to develop. The child per- forms his actions of grasping or sitting or turning or 144 Business Psychology walking or playing or making a noise in a purely auto- matic way. But whatever he performs, he becomes aware of the effect. The block on the table awakes his impulse to grasp it. But as soon as he grasps it, he perceives his own grasping. The order of events for him is there- fore first to perceive the wooden block on the table and then to perceive the muscle sensations of grasping and finally to perceive the block in his hand. The outcome is that associations are formed. The experienced order of brain events becomes linked in the nerve mechanisms. The next stage must be that if such a wooden block is seen again on the table, it not only awakes the impulse to grasp it as before, but that through the still quicker associa- tive connection the memory-image of those movement sensations and of the idea of the block in the hand arises in consciousness. If we take the case that it was not a wooden block but a knife, with which he cut his finger, the process will be still more complex. The seeing of the knife in the future will awake again the impulse to seize it, but the asso- ciated memory-image of the movement sensation and of the picture of the knife in his hand will now be linked with the memory of the pain from the cut. This idea of the resulting pain will be strong enough to produce the oppo- site effect; the action will be stopped. The idea before the action is thus entirely the product of mechanical asso- ciations; and yet the presence of these associations se- cures the will-character for the deed. All the earlier experiences of the child become in this way serviceable in selecting his action. It is a true will-action. This development is going on all the time. We adult persons come to new will-actions also by first passing through automatic actions, learning their results, and bringing up the memory-images of them in the service of Impulse and Will 145 more complex actions to be performed. To be sure, in the center of such actions we find in our consciousness a special feeling of decision. There comes a moment when we are aware that many actions are possible but we want to perform just the one. We select it out of the rival ideas of ends. Is there not, after all, some special will involved which gives a push to one action and suppresses the others? Yet this feeling of impulse is only the idea of the first step to be taken. Most of our actions involve a whole chain of movements. If we are to undertake a journey, as many of us often must, we do not have one motor impulse before us, but a system of thousands of actions. The muscle contrac- tions which we need for buying the railroad ticket or packing our trunk are not the carrying out of the journey. The idea which we have in mind before we begin that chain of actions may not be the act of traveling, but per- haps the sight of the city which we want to visit or the names of the men on whom we want to call or of the hotels which we are to frequent. If we are undecided whether we ought to undertake the journey or not, the idea of that distant town and of our calls there may rival in our mind the idea of the comforts at home or the tasks which we might carry on at home or the idea of saving the money which the journey will cost. There comes a mo- ment when the final decision must be made whether we will travel or stay at home. But if we analyze it carefully we find that even this act of decision is again nothing but such a thinking of the end with the emphasis which leads to action. Only this end is now not the final end ; it is the first step, the first movements to be carried out. If these first movements are present in the mind in the form of movement-sensa- tions, they are felt as the immediate introduction to the 146 Business Psychology whole performance and are taken as the necessary sig- nal. They rise, therefore, to the dignity of a decisive factor and give us the feeling of an ultimate impulse to go on our journey. Their immediate effect is a new set- ting of all our brain connections by which every idea is carried into the appropriate paths in the service of our plan for the journey. All the further processes are then almost automatic reactions. The chief point for us is that here too the so-called will element, the act of deci- sion, is nothing but this idea of the end in the mind before the act is performed. INTERPLAY OF AUTOMATIC ACTIONS AND WILL-ACTIONS The building up of our will-actions, however, demands a further consideration. Our automatic actions, we saw, become will-actions as soon as by association the memory- idea of the perceived end enters consciousness before the action is performed. Our will-action, on the other hand, can at any time become automatic ; and this is very im- portant. It is the very condition of our development in the world of our practical affairs. Of course, it would not help us if it were simply a turning of this will-action into the original automatic action. The true situation is this : Our automatic actions become will-actions, and thus become subordinated to our plans. We can use them in the service of our ends, and we can combine them for new ends which could not be reached automatically. The sin- gle hand and finger movements of the child are proceed- ing automatically until they are under the control of the will by the acquisition of those movement sensations. When that stage is reached, many of these movements can be combined, for instance, into the writing move- ments, which could never arise automatically. They are the result of th9se conscious will-efforts. But as soon as Impulse and Will 147 these complex actions of writing have been performed repeatedly, this whole complex will performance can be- come automatic. The mere idea of the word to be written leads to the total set of movements without any particular idea of the movements to be performed, and that means, without any special will-effort, to write the word. When the adult person writes a letter, the idea to be expressed secures the nervous action by which the fingers move in the correct order until the whole word has been written down. The writing itself has become as automatic as originally the simplest finger movement. This alone makes it possible to use the finger action of writing in the service of still more complex will-activities, like book- keeping or correspondence. The trained typist responds to the sound of a spoken word by the finger movements on the keyboard of the typewriting machine without giving any will-effort to the choice of the particular keys. His will-actions, which were at first difficult, have become automatized. In this way we have an endless interplay. Automatic movements with which nature has provided the nervous mechanism are made parts of complex will-actions, and by repetition these will-actions themselves become auto- matic. As soon as they are automatic, they can again enter as parts into more complex will-actions. But most of our life is carried on through the agency of these auto- matic performances. APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLES IN BUSINESS So much of the theory of impulse and will is surely needed to understand psychologically the details of indus- trial and commercial activities. More than that, whoever understands clearly these theoretical principles can easily deduce from them the answers to any special questions Business Psychology which a concrete situation may offer. Every function in the business sphere culminates in some action, and every effort to improve the work must be controlled by understanding of these actions and their causes. As long as the actions are considered only from without, every endeavor for improvement must remain superficial, like the treatment of a patient by a quack who deals only with symptoms and does not enter into the origin of the disease. But if the psychological conditions of activity are clearly understood in general, then it is easy to find for every special case the most favorable conditions and tlio means to improve the situation. The interest will center on the one side in the problems of learning and training, on the other side in the problems of the most favorable conditions for commercial and industrial activ- ity. In both spheres the practical discussion is essen- tially nothing but an application of the principles which we have discussed. However, before we turn to these two groups of spe- cific questions, we may consider one more consequence of the theory of the will, namely, that change of activity by which the action is performed under the influence of a suggestion. It has distinct practical importance and we may therefore treat the theory of suggestion here as an appendix to the theory of the will. TEST QUESTIONS 1. How would you define the will? 2. How does the modern view of the relationship of mental states to bodily actions differ from the older belief? 3. Distinguish between automatic actions and will-actions. Which are used most ? 4. "WTien do we really have a will-action ? Impulse and Will 149 5. What is the tendency of an oft-repeated will-action ? What practical bearing has this upon industrial activities ? 6. What are abnormal actions ? How are they produced ? 7. How is will-power developed? 8. How may will-actions become automatic? What are the economies of such actions? CHAPTER XI SUGGESTION INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL SOURCES OP IDEAS We saw that an action is first of all the direct automatic outcome of ideas and that particular importance is at- tached to those ideas in which we are imagining the ends of possible actions. Such an idea of an end may be brought to our mind by a proposition from without. We motor along our road and see there a guide-post saying that the right-hand road leads to our destination. The idea of the movement of turning to the right enters our mind and we change the direction of the car. The mental mechanism involved is rather complex, but it can easily be traced. The guide-post awakes in us confidence that it is authorized and helpful advice which is offered, and therefore we feel that it is in accordance with the interests of our personality to stick to the pro- poed idea. The image of turning to the right is wel- comed accordingly as harmonious with the needs of the self. It becomes accentuated and focused in our mind and through the well-trained associational connections the idea of turning sets the motor centers of the appro- priate muscles into action. We leave the forward road and steer to the right. But let us take the case that a friend is in our car who tells us that he positively knows that the road to the right is being repaired and cannot be used by motor cars and that the only possible way is straight ahead. A con- 150 Suggestion 151 flict of the ideas of possible actions is now going on in our mind. If we are convinced that our friend has the interest of our personality in mind and that his powers of observation and of memory are alive and that he is not confusing earlier experiences, we shall feel that his pro- posed idea is more completely in agreement with the in- terests of our self, and we shall drive straight ahead. This is the typical case of a normal rivalry of proposed ideas, a rivalry in which the one idea will become efficient which appears most in agreement with the setting of our personality and its aims. For that purpose many asso- ciations may have to be called to help in our dilemma. During our drive we might not be satisfied with the advice of the guide-post or with the advice of our friend, but we might back the one or the other idea or both by secondary associations. We might remember that some- one else told us of those repairs. On the other hand we might think that if the repairs were going on, some an- nouncement would be made there at the crossroad. We might also remember that our friend is sometimes in- clined to erroneous reports through confusions of his memory. In short, there may be a battle of the rival associations, but both sides have perfectly fair chances. The situation would not be different if only one of the two propositions came from without and the other from within. If I have gone along that road repeatedly and have found out that the way to the right was the correct one, then I do not need the guide-post. My consciousness furnishes the idea of the end ; I turn to the right, guided by my own intention. If now my friend interferes with his proposition, I can soberly balance my idea and his, and can compare my arguments and his. 152 Business Psychology WEAKENING INTERNAL RESISTANCE But let us carry this case a little farther. Fancy that I am extremely tired. After a poor night and a long drive I am exhausted and give little attention to the ideas which cross my mind. When I approach the crossroad, I should naturally turn to the right, but my friend insistently says, "You must go the straight road." His words bring that idea of going ahead strongly to my mind while, be- cause of my state of overfatigue, my own associations are weakened ; they do not come readily to my conscious- ness and the result is that I do not offer the opposition which naturally would have come up. I accept the idea of action which my friend threw out, and automatically the proposed idea leads to my activity ; the normal resist- ance which I ought to furnish from my own resources fails to come forward, as I am too careless on account of my fatigue. Fatigue, however, is not the only condition under which such a result may occur. I may be a very credulous per- son and may have an unusual amount of confidence in the superior wisdom of my friend. This would express itself in a frame of mind in which I would suppress from the start all the ideas of actions which were contrary to those which he proposes. The idea of action which he brings before my mind would then work almost like a command which I do not resist but which I carry out mechanically. We may think of still another case. If I were that kind of person, I might have taken a few drinks. By the in- fluence of the alcohol the resistance power of my brain mechanism would have been decreased. Even without particular confidence in my friend, I should have accepted hii proposition, simply because the alcoholized brain cells would have been unable to bring up the opposing ideas. Suggestion 153 The result would have been that the words of my friend would have worked as if they advised the only possible action, and mechanically I should have accepted his proposition. In such an exhausted or overcredulous or drunken per- sonality we no longer have the full process of normal will-action with the normal interplay of motives. Any- thing which is proposed forces itself on the mind and excludes the ideas of opposite action which otherwise the situation would bring to consciousness. To be sure, this has its limits. If the driver, however exhausted or cred- ulous, is told by his friend to go straight ahead when it is evident that the straight way would lead into a river, the brain would find its resistance. The sight of the imminent danger would throw the resisting idea sharply into consciousness and would be strong enough to over- come the perilous advice after all. If the alcohol poison- ing was very strong, even such a dangerous situation might not have power enough to excite sufficient resistance to the impulse for the proposed action. The drunken man sees that river, but it does not awake the normal associations. It appears to him in that moment like a joke to plunge the car into the water. The lack of resist- ance by opposing ideas may accordingly pass through many degrees. The resistance may have suffered very little from a slight degree of fatigue or may have suf- fered tremendously from a narcotization of the brain. NATURE OF SUGGESTIBILITY A proposition to action which is brought to the mind in such a way that the idea of the opposite action is more or less suppressed is called by the psychologist a "sug- gestion." The state of mind in which an individual is especially ready to accept such suggestions is called 154 Business Psychology "suggestibility." This suggestibility can pass through many degrees of strength. Human beings differ with re- gard to their suggestibility anyhow. We all know persons who are very much inclined to do whatever the latest adviser tells them, while others represent the opposite extreme, are stubborn and always unwilling to accept any advice. The psychologist even recognizes negatively suggestible persons who feel an impulse always to do the opposite of what is proposed to them. But after all they are exceptional. The normal situation is for a proposi- tion to awake an impulse but at the same time it awakes the idea of possible arguments in opposition, if the situa- tion demands them, and only the very suggestible persons are without these opposing ideas. Yet every one of us, even without alcohol or narcotics and without overfatigue, may pass through different stages of suggestibility at various times. It is well known, for instance, that we all are more suggestible in a strongly emotional state. Hope and fear make us very suggestible. Anything which impresses us, like a church service or a court trial, makes us more than normally willing to accept the propositions which come from with- out and to offer no resistance by opposed ideas from within. The lawyer makes many a witness affirm a state- ment to which he might have objected in ordinary conver- sation. But the solemnity of the action has brought his mind into an oversuggestible state in which the opposing ideas are inhibited and the ideas which the lawyer pro- poses are accepted without resistance. HYPNOTISM The suggestibility can certainly be strongly influenced from without. We can make a person more suggestible and thus bring him into a mental state in which he is Suggestion 155 more willing to accept our propositions on account of the decreased resistance by opposing ideas. The strongest possible intrusion of this kind is hypnotization. There is nothing mystical in hypnotization, and it is not difficult to hypnotize a person, however harmful it may be to do so. The only legitimate aim of hypnotization is medical treat- ment. If, for instance, a patient has an irresistible tend- ency to use morphine or cocaine, the mere saying to him that he ought not to use it remains fruitless. His crav- ing for the injection is stronger than any proposition of the physician. But if the physician hypnotizes him skill- fully, he may increase the suggestibility of the patient so strongly that the mere suggestion that he will not take morphine injections again may indeed be stronger than the acquired desire and may bring back the victim to normal, healthy life. This increase of suggestibility is indeed the most es- sential feature of the whole hypnotic state. It is pro- duced by applying faint stimulations to the senses of the person to be hypotized and is much aided by appropriate words. The physician tells his subject that he will fall asleep, that he feels tiredness creeping over him, that a general relaxation will set in, and so on, and slowly the hypnotic state takes hold of the mind, a state which stands halfway between waking and sleeping. No special energy flows from physician to patient. The sense-im- pressions and words alone perform the work. In any case, as soon as the hypnotization is accomplished and with skillful operation it can be accomplished with any- one the power of mental resistance is broken. If the hypnotizer were to tell the hypnotized person that he ought to hand him his pocketbook, the idea that that is a scandalous theft would not enter the mind of the victim at all. The idea that he ought to give that pocketbook 156 Business Psychology to the man who asks for it would remain uncontradicted in his mind. More than that, as all resistance fails, the hypnotized person would even associate all kinds of illusory reasons why it is better to hand all his money to the hypnotizer. The state of hypnotization represents the climax of suggestibility. But there are many means far short of hypnotization which create milder degrees of increased suggestibility. Yet they may have considerable influence in forcing one man 's intentions on the will of other men. If it were possible and legitimate to hypnotize everyone, even against his will, without medical reasons, business success might easily be attained, at least for the instant. The salesman would hypnotize his customer and would tell him that he ought to buy just this pearl necklace which he is showing him. The command to buy the costly jewels would be received as an idea which finds no oppo- site associations in the mind and which must therefore discharge itself in the act of buying the chain, while in the normal state of the mind at once the idea would arise that the purchase is too expensive or that it is a super- fluous luxury. These antagonistic ideas would be strong enough to stir up the opposite action of refusing to buy. As a matter of course the customer cannot be hypnotized. And if, as has happened, an agreement to buy has been made under hypnotic conditions, it is a clear act of fraud which has only criminal interest. PRACTICAL USES OF SUGGESTION This does not mean, however, that the merchant has to abstain entirely from such suggestive influences. If we consider an entirely cool and indifferent offering without any effort to influence the mind of the customer as the one extreme and hypnotization as the other extreme, we must Suggestion 157 recognize that there are very many steps between them. Nobody has a right, because the one extreme of sugges- tion, hypnosis, is out of the question, to demand that therefore the other extreme, entire abstaining from sug- gestion, be carried out. We must not forget that sug- gestive influence from man to man is nothing abnormal or pathological. Suggestion plays a tremendous role in every important sphere of social life. Education depends to a high degree on suggestion. The teacher must take hold of the child 's mind so that the ideas implanted be accepted without arousing the opposite ideas. Politics and religion can- not be thought of without the working of suggestive ener- gies. Nor would art and literature ever influence us so deeply if all were brought down to sober reasoning and arguing. The true artistic effect and the impression of poetry involve that suggestible state of mind in which the offering of the artist is received as a reality. But this is possible only if the opposite idea, namely, that all these stories and all these pictures are not true but are inven- tions, is entirely inhibited in the reader's and the specta- tor's mind. All the means of the artist's technique have the very aim to make the mind more suggestible and to prepare it for the acceptance of the illusory truth which the book or the painting suggests. Hence if the poet and the artist, the politician and the minister, the lawyer and, above all, the educator, must be expected to exert sug- gestive influences, it cannot appear wrong for the sales- man or for the advertiser or for anyone who aims toward practical success in the world of commerce and industry to make reasonable use of the powers of suggestion. SUGGESTION IN SALESMANSHIP The salesman's aim is indeed to influence his cus- tomer's mind in such a way that the idea of the purchase 158 Business Psychology does not find the opposing forces overwhelming. From all the preceding discussions we understand now that this alone is the point. The aim is not to connect the idea of the purchase with the appropriate action, because we have seen that this connection exists in the mind nerve- system anyhow. The idea has the natural tendency to express itself in the fit-action. No special initiation by a will behind the mind is needed. But this action is not performed because opposite ideas of saving our money or of seeking some more suitable goods or of disliking the offered wares or of postponing the purchase have still stronger effectiveness on the system of possible actions. Nothing is necessary but to suppress those rivals, and to do that three ways are open. One way is to strengthen the suggestive power of the idea by re-enforcing it; the second to weaken the opposing idea directly by under- mining it ; and the third way is to heighten the suggesti- bility of the customer and thus to strengthen the sug- gested idea and to weaken the opposite idea indirectly through the suggestible attitude. All three methods can easily be combined. If we think first of the case of the salesman, the method of re-enforcing the proffered idea of purchase can be applied in many forms. Everything which is said in praise of the goods works in this direction. The praise can be linked with any appeals to the feeling of interest of the personality. If it can be shown that it would add to the distinction of the buyer or to his health or to his social standing or to his safety or to his amusement, or that it would give especial pleasure to those for whom he buys it, the feeling elements will strengthen the ap- peal. But the same effect is reached by bringing the offered goods strongly into the focus of his sensory at- tention. Then the salesman shows the article in different Suggestion 159 positions, prepares a background which by the contrast brings it into striking effect or displays many similar ob- jects so that each may support the effect of the others, and pictures the pleasant consequences of its use. Skill- ful movements can aid this effort. They help to concen- trate the mind on the one thing while careless, scattered movements of the hands draw attention hither and thither and diminish the effectiveness of the proposition. The negative effect by which the opposing idea is to be weakened is also reached directly by associations. The idea of the great expense of any rival article, or of its dangers to health or safety, or its lack of fashion or charm, can be pointed out. But here too the sense effect must be considered. As soon as the purchaser's atten- tion is more or less focused on the one object which he is probably to buy, it would be a mistake to show him any others which would oppose that first impulse and would weaken it. Any interfering impression must be eliminated. But the chief effect may be expected from that third factor, the increase of suggestibility. Everything which awakes a feeling of sympathy, of personal interest in the speaker, of bodily comfort, of harmony with the sur- roundings, of trust and instinctive confidence, heightens the suggestible mood. On the other hand, whatever irri- tates must decrease the suggestibility. The customer in a comfortable chair in cosy surroundings in a store which suggests harmony with his particular standards of fash- ion, served with politeness, easily enters into that state which lies midway between indifference and slight hypno- sis. It is a mood of readiness to receive propositions to action and to inhibit all opposing ideas. The voice, the words, the manners, of the salesman will contribute greatly to this resetting of mind and nervous system. 160 Business Psychology True hypnotism is secured by monotonous sounds, slight strain of converging the eyes, soft touch sensations, and so on. The effect probably results from a contraction of blood vessels in certain parts of the brain. In a quite similar way the mild, insistent, somewhat monotonous words of the clerk can affect the listener. The comfort- able surroundings produce moreover a general relaxation which also strengthens the suggestibility. There are, however, individual differences, and tho skilled salesman will become aware of the best point of attack in his effort to increase the suggestibility. Many minds are easily captured by a certain enthusiasm of the speaker which forces on the hearer an imitative impulse, and the more he is carried away the more he loses the power of resistance and enters into a state of increased suggestibility. The personal element is most effective among the means of awaking sympathy. But again in- dividual differences must not be disregarded. An air of confidential intimacy is very impressive to some, and awakes almost negative suggestibility in others. The at- titude of superior wisdom breaks down the resistance of ideas with not a few, but may irritate other types of minds. Good-natured humor seems to have chances with the greatest number. The skillful salesman will not only make use of all three methods, re-enforcing his sug- gestion, breaking down the counter-suggestions, and strengthening the suggestibility, but he will in every case recognize the particular methods which appeal to the individual customer. It is evident that such methods can be misused, and the psychologist who describes the mechanism of efficient methods would overstep the limits of his function if he were to advise the use of such schemes without reserve. But the business man knows anyhow that it would be poor Suggestion 161 psychology to misuse the method of suggestion for a sale of goods which awakes regret when the spell of the in- creased suggestibility is over. A good sale must always be equally in the interest of buyer and seller. But within reasonable limits skillful suggestion does indeed help the buyer. Moreover the psychologist's interest is not con- fined to the methods which make suggestions effective, but turns also to the methods by which the buyer may protect himself against purchases for which he will be sorry afterward. In a time which favors personal waste and ostentation, it is surely a very important psycho- logical problem how to strengthen the mind against the temptation which the displays and the suggestive effects of the stores offer to the population. But to understand well the mechanism of suggestion means to understand at the same time the mechanism of the checks upon it. SUGGESTION IN ADVEKTISING Every advertisement in a sense repeats the methods of the salesman. To be sure, the salesman has the ad- vantage of a successive development of various stages and of an adjustment to the responses of the individual purchaser. On the other hand, while the salesman ap- peals to one, the advertisement may reach millions. Everywhere it has to awake the impulse to buy and can strengthen this impulse by every means which aids the suggestive power of the proposition and strengthens the general suggestibility. It is well known that even such simple devices as the imperative form of an advertise- ment can force the suggestion on a reader. But when such forms become standardized, they lose their effective- ness and new methods must be sought +o give to the offer that inner force by which the opposite ideas are inhibited in the reader's mind. No doubt, repetition, enlargement, Business Psychology pictures, colors, borders, skillful appeals to prejudices, emotions, and interests, can all be helpful in the re-en- forcement of the suggestion. To make the action easy is another well-known little aid. The coupon to be cut out from the paper and filled in is typical of this group of practical schemes. It removes the resistance which the laziness of the reader may offer to the impulse to buy, and at the same time focuses the scattered impulses in one definite direction. SELF-SUGGESTIONS As a last word concerning suggestion in practical af- fairs, it may be emphasized that we can give suggestions to ourselves. What we really mean by such autosugges- tions is however not only that we are the givers of the suggestion but that by our own effort our mind is brought into a state in which our own plans of action become un- usually effective. Under ordinary circumstances our will-intention may map out a piece of work, but when it comes to action opposite motives may be stronger. We may have planned to do some extra work in the evening and to stay in the office with the ledger over the dinner hour. But in the evening the appetite for the meal works as a stimulus in the contrary direction or we are thinking that we might go to the theatre. The idea at first creeps into the mind and awakes a feeling; the feeling strength- ens the idea ; and finally it reaches such intensity that the impulse to leave the office becomes stronger than the im- pulse to fulfill the plan which we had made out a few hours before. If someone had hypnotized us at noontime and given us the suggestion that we stay through the evening at our work, that desire for the theatre or the meal would have been inhibited, the proposed plan of Suggestion 163 action would have overwhelmed every opponent in ur mind, and we should have willingly staid. Instead of being hypnotized or instead of receiving any influence which might increase our suggestibility from without, we can exert such an influence on ourselves. We can do it in the form of a firm resolution, like a pledge given to ourselves. Such a resolution is a resetting of our mind, an opening of certain brain paths and a closing of others, and the effect is exactly that of hypnotization, namely, a greater readiness to carry out one group of propositions and a greater power to suppress the oppo- site impulses. If we had given to our minds that shock of firm resolution at noontime, the little discomfort of appetite and the little desire for the theatre would not have reached our attention at all. They would have re- mained in the outskirts of consciousness ; they would have been sufficiently inhibited not to overcome our resolution to stick to our work. But a similar result might have been reached in an- other way which has still more the character of hypnoti- zation. Instead of stirring up the mind and creating a resetting by the resolution we can lull our mind into a kind of vague, half -dreamy state. As soon as we produce such an almost sleep-like condition, we must say to our- selves that we shall carry out this or that action. If we repeat this inner promise several times, it sinks into the deeper stratum of the mind, gets hold of our inner set- ting, and gives to our later actions an energy which they would not have possessed without this artificial help. The minutes just before sleep comes in the evening are especially favorable for such autosuggestion. Especially men whose will-energy is weak and who do not succeed in their business life because they lack energy may profit from such autosuggestions in a mental lull. Yet normally 164 Business Psychology the way more to be recommended is that of the sharp inner resolution. It is wise indeed not to leave every struggle of will-impulses to the decisions of the moment but to fortify one's own will beforehand by such definite pledges which give strength to the personal character and make the overcoming of distractions and temptations easier. TEST QUESTIONS 1. What is meant by a suggestion? 2. How do fatigue, credulouaness, and intoxication affect our power of control! 3. Why are some men particularly subject to suggestive in- fluences in a court room ? 4. Why do many judges and clergymen continue to wear robes ? 5. What is hypnotism T 6. Enumerate some practical uses of suggestion in business affairs. 7. What is meant by ' ' the idea of an act resulting in that act unless inhibited by an opposing idea"? Of what practical impor- tance is this to a salesman ? 8. Why should the consumer understand something of the laws of suggestion ? 9. How can a man use autosuggestion to increase his effi- ciency? CHAPTER XH THE ACQUIREMENT OF ABILITIES PHYSICAL AND MENTAL UNITY Business life is activity, and every activity beyond the immediate automatic movements must be learned. How far can psychology contribute to an understanding of the best methods to acquire the ability for effective action? But here especially we must not forget that no sharp limit exists between the bodily and the mental actions. The contractions of muscles are more prominent in some ac- tivities than in others but there is never any activity which does not contain both bodily and mental functions. The workingman who, to feed a machine, has to learn a complicated co-operation of foot and arm and finger action is more conscious of this bodily element than the bookkeeper who adds figures or than the salesman who explains the qualities of his goods. Yet even in these cases it is not enough to point to the muscle contractions in writing with a pen or in speaking the words. No, the adding of the figures themselves or the choosing of the right arguments is a personal activity which concerns mind and body together. The laws and rules which control the acquisition of abilities are therefore practically the same for the so- called physical and the so-called mental operations. We must learn how to serve customers or how to administer a shop or how to manage a railway according to the same principles of learning and training as those which govern 165 166 Business Psychology the study of typewriting or telegraphing or weaving. And these again are hardly different from the methods by which the child learns to walk, to talk, to read, to write. LEARNING BY REPETITION The whole process is in every case complicated. We may consider first one element which enters into the learning process every time, but which surely is not in itself sufficient. It is only one element, but an indispen- sable one. All learning needs repetition. To repeat the process frequently is the chief condition for the acquir- ing of a reliable ability. Offhand we might say that if we perform a movement we can do it more and more effi- ciently the more often we repeai it. A definite experiment may indicate the character of the effect. A weight of three pounds was lifted with the middle finger once a second as long as possible while the other fingers were held immovable. The ability to lift it showed an average of 48 in the first week, in the second of 60, in the third of 86, in the fourth of 116, in the fifth of 136. This result of repetition is not lost by a pause. When the experimenter had reached this effect of train- ing after five weeks he interrupted his exercises for three months. When he took up the movements again, the average of the first week was then not at the low level of his beginning, but was at once 95. The training was car- ried on again for ten weeks, and again interrupted for three months. The third period began at once with an average ability of lifting the weight 105 times, and seven weeks later the power to lift the weight 186 times was reached. A fourth period began with 169 and climbed quickly to 192. The gain which repetition of movement brings is thus carried through periods of months of rest with relatively small loss. Acquirement of Abilities 167 INFLTJENCB OF REPETITION ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM Such movement experiments are important for us be- cause gain and loss are not to be sought in the muscles themselves Ihit distinctly in the nervous system. The brain centers which control those finger movements are alone responsible for the effect of practice. They become trained by the repetition. It is therefore not surprising that similar experiments have shown that the effect of repeated action is carried over to the symmetrical muscle groups of the other half of the body and also to neighbor- ing muscles. In lifting the weight with the middle finger of the right hand the middle finger of the left hand gets its training, because the brain centers of the two corre- sponding organs stand in immediate relation. Any sys- tematic training of one muscle group is therefore to a certain degree a strengthening of all. To be sure, the experiment demonstrates that this is true only within cer- tain limits. If excessive efforts are demanded for a par- ticular muscle group the one-sided training of the one brain center saps the energy of others and ultimately decreases the power of the other motor parts of the brain. The important point for us is that repetition of action improves the ability to perform it and improves it by training not the muscles but the nerve paths in the brain. The same laws which control the simple motor impulse for the lifting of a weight are therefore efficient also where a more complicated task is demanded from the nerve centers. A careful investigation, for instance, traced the learning process in tossing and catching balls. Two balls were kept going with one hand r one being re- ceived and thrown while the other was in the air. Six men took part in the experiment and the programme con- sisted of ten trials, the subject in each case continuing 168 Business Psychology the throwing until he failed to catch one or both of the balls. In such a complex action in which a general co- operation of almost all the muscles of the body is required the conditions of success are much more variable. The result showed one phenomenon which can be found in all such learning experiments, namely, that the progress is at first slow and then quicker, until the highest point of efficiency is reached. But experiments of this type, just because they are extremely complex, allow us at the same time to see the manifoldness of conditions under which our central nervous system works. The increasing ability means here not only a training in the right combination of impulses but a growing abil- ity to exclude wrong movements and to avoid mistakes. The individual learns to eliminate unfit chance move- ments or to avoid inappropriate positions of the body by which the tossing or catching of the ball is hindered. A certain definite combination of impulses is slowly devel- oped. The result is that the improvement is not a per- fectly steady one, but if it were plotted as a curve it would show irregular interruptions. A new combination of the nervous paths is formed and at once a definite improve- ment becomes noticeable. For this reason it is not sur- prising that a certain improvement may set in even in periods of rest. One of the experimenters, who after two weeks of training reached an ability to make 195 correct tosses in one series, gained the power to make over 300 tosses shortly after four months of complete rest. As soon as the right hand had acquired the ability in high development, the same experiments were made with the left hand. Originally the achievement of the left hand was, of course, far below that of the right, but after the training of the right hand the left hand showed a power to toss and catch far superior to that which the right Acquirement of Abilities 169 hand had shown in the beginning. Moreover the train- ing of the left went on much more rapidly. CONSCIOUS EFFORT REQUIRED IN REPETITION Experiments of this type contain another suggestion which is very important for the learning of industrial activities. They indicate that improvement is gained only from repetitions the success or failure of which can be noticed by the acting person. The mere frequent performing of the action itself is no condition for im- provement. The individual learns only if he becomes aware of the mistakes and makes an effort to adjust the setting of his mind, that is, of his brain centers, in ac- cordance with the results. Where this is not the case, the unsuccessful repetitions are directly destroying the desirable setting. The ideal improvement results there- fore from repetitions of successful actions only. One of the consequences is that repetition is no help to the acquisition of ability as soon as a certain degree of fatigue is reached. The fatigued mind may still be able to give the motor impulse for the action, but is not able to give attention to a careful valuation of the outcome. The fatigued mind hardly discriminates between the per- fect and the poor movement, or at least it does not adjust itself to the unsuccessful movement by an inner change. It does not profit from the mistakes. As soon as perfect nervous connections for an action are developed, the per- formance may be continued even in fatigue. But the learning process ought never to be carried to a degree of fatigue in which the mind has become indifferent to the successful or unsuccessful performance. Mechanic- ally to carry on the repetition through such a state of mental dullness means rather to harm than to further the newly acquired ability. !? Business Psychology AVOID EXCEPTIONS IN REPETITION If the effect of repetition is dependent entirely on the easier connections of nervous paths, it is evident that a good training demands the avoidance of exceptions. The formation of nervous habits must be made more difficult if from time to time wrong connections are used. The psychologist can give to the ambitious pupil no more earnest advice: Never allow exceptions. It is the only way to make learning easy. As soon as a set of actions in response to a given stimulus has become habitual, every difficulty is overcome. It is the exception which in- terferes with this settling of habits. In a moment of lazi- ness or indifference it may appear easier not to undertake the standardized action, but once yielding to such a feel- ing means to break down the connections which have been formed. This is true not only of definite movements needed for a technical purpose but even for complex actions of general behavior. If we train ourselves to pack away everything on our desk before we leave the office, or to put all the tools in the workshop in their places when we are through with the work, or to answer the letters of the morning before night, or to speak politely to the cus- tomer, or to carry a part of the week's earnings to the savings bank, every new realization of such a plan facili- tates the next performance; every breaking of our rule, every case of disorder or impoliteness or squandering, disarranges the mental connections and creates a resist- ance for the next occasion. It is much easier to do our duty always than to do it usually but to allow occasional slips. If we discipline ourselves for regular performance of accurate work we create conditions in our own per- sonal system by which the task before us is made much easier. Acquirement of Abilities 171 REPETITION IN ACQUIRING DIFFERENT HABITS SIDE BY SIDE The demand not to disturb the formation of habits by exceptional wrong nerve impulses is not contradicted by the fact that different habits can be developed side by side. If we learn to respond to a certain situation by one kind of action, this does not interfere with the training for an entirely different kind of response. A very simple experiment may demonstrate the situation. I was ac- customed to carry my watch in the left vest pocket. On the first of a month I put it into my right trousers pocket and wrote down the number of false movements until I became accustomed to the new activity which was neces- sary to see the time. In the first days many wrong move- ments were made or at least started, then fewer and fewer, until I was accustomed to the new position. On the first of the next month I replaced the watch in the left vest pocket and noted how often I made the wrong movement to the right trousers pocket. Less practice was needed this time to reach the point at which no mis- takes were made. Some traces of the old habit had ac- cordingly remained in the nervous system. I repeated this change to and fro from month to month and the re- sult was that both habits constantly grew stronger and both finally became automatic. After the fourth change there were no wrong reactions at all. I made similar experiments with inkstands on my writing table, during one period having ink in the right inkstand, during the other in the left. And finally I experi- mented with two doors from my study to the hall, keeping one or the other locked alternately and noting the num- ber of wrong movements. It became evident that the tendency to two such different movements in response to the same will-idea can become equally mechanized in 172 Business Psychology our nervous system so that each can be carried out as soon as the right signal is given without any interference from the other. This is the reason why we can master two or more languages with equal ease. The same thing before us or the same situation may give us in one mo- ment the impulse to speak the French words, In another situation to answer with an English or a German or a Spanish phrase. Thus no activity demands a narrow one-sidedness. Ef- ficient training in one system of action never excludes thorough training in another system, even if they partly overlap or have common starting points. Practice does not involve narrowness. Concentration and repetition in one line go well with training in another. But it is easy to understand from all which we have discussed that the two groups of movements to be learned will inter- fere less with each other if they are not too similar. It is easier to learn piano-playing and violin-playing at the same time than to learn violin-playing and violoncello- playing. The technical worker too will master with less effort the technique of two very different machines than of two machines which are partly alike and partly dif- ferent. OBGANIZATION OP COMPLEX HABITS The experiment with tossing and catching the ball sug- gested to us that the learning of a complex movement includes more than the mere repetition of a special im- pulse and muscle contraction. The factor which is not less essential than repetition is the organization of move- ments. A systematic organization is indeed the chief help toward the upbuilding of a practical habit. To write with a pen involves endlessly more than the ability to make straight downward movements with the pen or Acquirement of Abilities 173 upward movements or loops or hooks or dots. Each of these little part movements of writing had to be tried and tried by the child until through repetition a definite ability was secured. Yet the essential step forward was the organic combination of such part movements into complex groups until one mental impulse could release the motor energy for all the muscle contractions needed for the writing of one letter. But even when the child, in its early writing efforts, had learned to organize these single finger movements into the complex movement needed for a whole letter, the end of the learning was not reached. The letters themselves had to be organized into the complex unit of the word, and the chief task of the writing lesson was the acquiring of this higher habit in which an idea can ex- press itself in that whole organized group of movements needed for the writing down of a word. The adult per- son, well trained in the use of the fountain pen, is no longer aware of the single letter, but gives the impulse for the word as a whole. The same, of course, is true of reading. "We respond to the optical impression of the total word with the speech impulse for the whole organ- ized group of letters. These simple cases give us a clue for the acquiring of complex technical habits in commercial and industrial life. Everywhere we must resolve the complex task into its elements and must learn to perform the elementary actions, especially through imitation. Then we must train ourselves in each of these elements until by repe- tition the functions become easier and easier and finally find no resistance. As soon as such various simple func- tions have become mechanical, they must be grouped to- gether into a higher unit which at first absorbs the full attention. This complex action is then learned again by 174 Business Psychology frequent repetition until it becomes just as automatic as its elements originally were. At that stage it can itself with other such automatic responses enter into a group of still higher order. Whatever our daily work may be, we are usually no longer aware of how many part-actions are automatically combined in th per- formance of our duties. As every new ability by which a group of movements has become mechanical allows us to turn our attention to further goals, we forget how long the process was by which we had to learn the correct carrying out of the simpler movements and their com- bination. REACHING THE END BY DISTINCT STEPS The development of such richer activities can easily be traced in much detail by laboratory experiments. We possess, for instance, an accurate investigation into the methods of learning to use the typewriting machine. Each key of the machine was provided with electric con- tacts, and it became possible to register by this con- trivance all the movements and to measure the time be- tween them. It was found that the process of learning consisted first of a steady elimination of unfit movements, a selection of appropriate impulses and their reorganiza- tion, and finally a combination of these into processes of higher order. But the most characteristic features are the irregular periods in which the learning itself seems not to make any progress. Such intervals of apparent rest may cover a month or more in spite of daily practice. But as soon as we analyze the process more in detail we see that just these periods are essential. They represent the time in which one stage of organization is reached and the next has not yet been started, because the old one is not sufficiently fixed by training. Acquirement of Abilities 175 At first the student of typewriting has to form the ele- mentary connection between the single letter and the movement toward the particular key. This needs train- ing for quite a while until an entirely new impulse can be organized, namely, the impulse which combines the move- ments for a number of keys, until finally the idea of the whole word is sufficient to release the movements for writing it. Similar results have been found in the care- ful experimental analysis of the processes needed in tele- graphing, both in sending and in receiving. The lowest connection refers here also to the single letters. As soon as the apprentice has mastered them, he steps for- ward to syllables and short words. These again need a long period of training until everything is so completely automatized that a still higher stage can be reached, and whole phrases can be grasped by one personal act. Even the simplest technique of the artisan or factory worker can be resolved into simpler parts and can be mastered fully only if the final product is built up from the more elementary processes. The more the single processes are mechanized by repetition, the more suc- cessful the organization will appear. On the other hand even the most complex and apparently irregular and highly personal activity of the man at the top can greatly profit from the application of these principles. The work may appear far beyond all routine technique, controlled entirely by the inspiration of the individual; and yet it could have been greatly helped by a planful organization of action. Even in the very highest type of work, such as the responsible administration of great industrial or com- mercial undertakings, large groups of facts remain al- ways the same. The more the responses toward these groups are trained and have become automatic, the more 176 Business Psychology it is possible to include them in larger groups and to or- ganize them. To learn to write shorthand or to drive a motor car or to typeset with a linotype machine is in these respects not different from acting as floorwalker in a department store or as superintendent in a mill or as president of a trust. The capacity for organizing mech- anized responses in new combinations is of course in- dividually very different. Everybody can learn to toss and catch one ball; not everybody is quite as successful with two ; and very few really learn to throw three balls with one hand. But the principles of learning are in all cases the same. It is not different when experience shows that not everybody can learn to handle successfully a great administrative organization. KEEPING THE END IN VIEW Only one further consequence ought to be drawn ; and much waste and much disappointment results in the busi- ness world from the neglect of this principle. We said that a complex movement must be systematically built up. The stages of learning must follow one another so that every new one is really prepared for by the fore- going one. The chief condition for full success is there- fore that the apprentice be taught to approach the task with a view toward the final stage. Practical life tends to lead in a very different direction. The beginner is usu- ally tempted to ask not how the whole process can be slowly built up but how to reach most quickly a certain end-effect. He uses some short cut and is satisfied if he can quickly see some results. As soon as such tolerable results are reached he tries to improve them by frequent repetitions and training and he is unaware that his method may be entirely unfit ever to lead to the greatest efficiency. Acquirement of Abilities 177 A familiar illustration is the learning of typewriting. If a beginner is left to himself, he invariably picks out the keys with the two forefingers. That gives him the ad- vantage of writing at once with a certain rapidity. Yet he will never rival those stenographers who learned from the beginning the touch system, using all ten fingers on the keyboard of the machine and being able to keep the eyes on the shorthand copy while the two hands are writ- ing. It is, of course, far more difficult to learn this com- plex motion of the ten fingers. This demands a slow or- ganization of movements, but in the end it is the only method to secure the greatest possible speed. Moreover, as soon as it is mastered, it needs not more but less mental effort to write with this better organized method. This case is in every respect typical. All the haphazard methods of learning are dangerous, and the desire to produce quickly a result which somewhat approaches the end in view is almost always misleading. In many fields, to be sure, the slow procedure of trying and trying again may be sufficient ultimately to produce satisfactory re- sults. But in most cases such self-help will never lead to the ideal end. The only safe method is to start with an analysis of the best possible scheme and then to force the beginner to go through all those slow ways of training by which this best possible method can be built up. His first steps may ap- pear entirely useless, because they seem not to lead di- rectly toward the end at all. He may have to learn at first partial actions which in themselves yield no results but are necessary to prepare for the more complex actions which finally yield the best possible results. The chance efforts of the beginner who is left to himself or left to the guidance of a teacher with haphazard methods may easily become the worst obstruction in the forward path. 178 Business Psychology Bad habits are acquired which interfere with the later training in better procedures. THE VALUE OF STANDARDIZATION IN INDUSTBY The psychologist cannot too seriously advise the intro- duction of carefully chosen standard methods for the learning of every complex commercial and industrial activity. In the schoolroom our time has become accus- tomed to have the methods of teaching under safe con- trol In earlier times it was considered enough that a teacher knew how to read and write and use English grammar and to calculate. It was left to her to teach by any chance method the things which she knew how to do herself. Today the teachers profit from a large amount of work devoted to the study of the best teaching methods and in special educational courses they learn the best possible steps toward the development of the various activities in the child. The pedagogy of commerce and industry is still very little developed. Especially in the mills and factories, but also in the commercial houses, each man picks up the details of his work in an accidental way. The apprentice depends upon the so-called common sense and experience of some foreman, and his learning too often begins at the wrong point. Mediocre results can generally be reached in many ways, but there is usually only one way to reach the best possible results and it is highly desirable in the interest of true efficiency to make sure beforehand which this perfect method is and to subordinate every act of training to the acquisition of this one best scheme. As soon as the development of the best methods is more thoroughly considered in business life, it is evident that a much greater standardization must result than the past has seen. To standardize business methods does not at Acquirement of Abilities 179 all mean to make them monotonous and to deprive the work of spontaneous freshness and personal inspiration. It means only wherever possible to remove the obstacles, to decrease the friction, and to give to the individual con- venient tools with which he can work to best -advantage. This is in no department more neglected than in the sphere of selling activities. While the technical methods of the mills and factories and even the procedures of the artisans have become more and more standardized, the buying and selling are mostly still left to very primitive methods which every salesman has to work out for him- self. There are no traditions and no regular forms. The same question may be asked in a department store a thousand times; and yet the salesman has to work out the answer from his own mental resources every time anew. He has not been trained in a carefully prepared technique of replying. The forms in which the goods are to be demonstrated and the ways in which the customer is to be met have to be chosen anew and to be worked out afresh in every instance by the ment