father. But when it comes to the
mental processes which enter into the agricultural work, he would
think it queer to consult science. He would not even be aware that
there is anything to know. The soil and the seed and even the plough
and the harvester are objects about which you can learn. But the
attention with which the man is to do his work, the memory, the
perception, the ideas which make themselves felt, the emotions and the
will which control the whole work, would never be objects about which
he would seek new knowledge; they are no problems for him, they are
taken for granted.

Yet we have to-day a full-fledged science which does deal with these
mental processes. Psychology speaks about real things as much as
chemistry, and the laws of mental life may be relied on now more
safely than the laws of meteorology. It seems unnatural that those
who have the interests of agriculture at heart should turn the
attention of the farmer exclusively to the results of the material
sciences and ignore completely the thorough, scientific interest in
the processes of the mind. To be sure, until recently we had the same
shortcoming in industrial enterprises of the factories. Manufacturer
and workingman looked as if hypnotized at the machines, forgetting
that those wheels of steel were not the only working powers under the
factory roof. A tremendous effort was devoted to the study and
improvement of the industrial apparatus and of the raw material, while
the mental fitness and the mental method of the army of workingmen was
dealt with unscientifically and high-handedly. But within the last few
years the attention of the industrial world has been seriously turned
to the matter-of-course fact that the workman's mind is more important
than the machine and the material, if the highest economic output is
to be secured. The great movement for scientific management, however
much or little its original plans may survive, has certainly once for
all convinced the world that the study of the man and his functions
ought to be the chief interest of the market, even in our electrical
age; and the more modest movement for vocational guidance has
emphasized this personal factor from sociological motives. At last
the psychologists themselves approached the problem of the worker in
the factory, began to examine his individual fitness for his work, and
to devise tests in order to select quickly those whose inborn mental
capacity makes them particula