uestions are to-day still so endlessly
far from the field of psychological experiments. Nevertheless we ought
not to forget the experience through which general experimental
psychology has gone in the last few decades. When the first
experiments were undertaken in order to deal systematically with the
mental life, the friends of this new science and its opponents agreed,
on the whole, in the belief that certainly only the most elementary
phenomena of consciousness, the sensations and the reactions of
impulses, would be accessible to the new method. The opponents
naturally compared this modest field with the great problems of the
mental totality, and therefore ridiculed the new narrow task as
unimportant. The friends, on the other hand, were eager to follow the
fresh path, because they were content to gain real exactitude by the
experiment at least in these simplest questions. Yet as soon as the
new independent workshops were established for the young science, it
was discovered that the method was able to open fields in which no one
had anticipated its usefulness. The experiments turned to the problems
of attention, of memory, of imagination, of feeling, of judgment, of
character, of aesthetic experience and so on. It is not improbable that
the method of the economic psychological experiment may also quickly
lead beyond the more elementary problems, as soon as it is
systematically applied, and then it, too, may conquer regions of
inquiry in which to-day no exact calculation of the psychological
factors seems possible.

If such an advance is to be a steady one, the economic psychologist
will emancipate himself from the chance question of what problems are
at this moment important for commerce and industry and will proceed
systematically step by step from those results which the psychological
laboratory has yielded under the non-economic points of view. Many
previous psychological or psychophysical inquiries almost touch the
problems of industrial achievement. For instance, the experiments on
imitation, which psychophysicists have carried on in purely
theoretical or pedagogical interests, move parallel to industrial
experiences. It is well known that the pacemaker plays his role not
only in the field of sport but also in the factory. The rhythm of one
laborer gains controlling importance for the others, who instinctively
imitate him. Some plants even have automatically working machines with
the special intention that the