e beginning to acquire
an exactly adjusted scheme of movement, but as soon as the
well-organized activity has become habitual, it will realize itself
with less inner interference. For the educated it is no harder to
speak correct grammar than to speak slang, and it is no more difficult
to write orthographically than to indulge in chaotic spelling, just as
in every field it is no harder to show good manners than to behave
rudely. If the sciences of digging and chopping, of reaping and
raking, of weeding and mowing, of spraying and feeding, are all
postulates of the future, each can transform the chance methods into
exact ones, and that means into truly efficient ones, only when every
element has been brought under the scrutiny of the psychological
laboratory. We must measure the time in hundredths of a second, must
study the psychophysical conditions of every movement, where not trees
are cut or hay raked, but where the tools move systems of levers which
record graphically the exact amount and character of every partial
effect. The one problem of the distribution of work and rest alone is
of such tremendous importance for the agricultural work that a real
scientific study of the details might lead to just as much saving as
the introduction of new machinery. The farmhand, who would never think
of wasting his money, wastes his energies by contracting big muscles,
where a better economized system of movement would allow him to reach
the same result through the contraction of smaller muscles, which
involves much less energy and much less fatigue. The loss by wrong
bending and wrong cooerdination of movement may be greater than by bad
weather.

Yet commonsense can never be sufficient to find the right motor will
impulses. The ideal distribution of pauses is extremely different from
merely stopping the work when a state of overfatigue has been reached.
Even general scientific rules could not be the last word. Subtle
psychological tests would have to be devised by which the plan for
alternation between work and rest could be carefully adjusted to the
individual needs of every rural worker. The mere sensation of fatigue
may be entirely misleading. It must be brought into definite relations
to temperature, moistness, character of the work, training, and other
factors. On the other hand, the absence of fatigue feeling would be in
itself no indication that the limit of safety has not been passed, and
yet the work itself must suffe