sharp rhythm of these lifeless
forerunners shall produce an involuntary imitation in the
psychophysical system. In a similar way many laboratory investigations
on suggestion and suggestibility point to such economic processes, and
it seems to me that especially the studies on the influence of the
ideas of purpose which are being undertaken nowadays in many
psychological laboratories may easily be connected with the problems
of economic life. We know how the consciousness of the task to be
performed has an organizing influence on the system of those
psychophysical acts which lead to the goal. The experiment has shown
under which conditions this effect can be reinforced and under which
reduced. Pedagogical experiments have also shown exactly what
influence belongs to the consciousness of the approach to the end of
work; the feeling of the nearness of the close heightens the
achievement, even of the fatigued subject. It would not be difficult
to connect psychophysical experiments of this kind with the problems
of the task and bonus system, which is nowadays so much discussed in
industrial life. The practical successes seem to prove that the
individual can do more with equal effort if he does not stand before
an unlimited mass of work of which he has to do as much as possible in
the course of the day, but if he is before a definitely determined,
limited task with the demand that he complete it in an exactly
calculated time. Scientific management has made far-reaching use of
this principle, but whether constant results for the various
industries can be hoped for from such methods must again be
ascertained by the psychological experiment.

These hopes surely will not weaken the interest of the psychologist
for those many psychological methods which lie outside of the
experimental research. A sociologist, who himself had been a laborer
in his earlier life, undertook in Germany last year an inquiry into
the psychological status of the laborers' achievement by the
questionnaire method.[49] He sent to 8000 workingmen in the mining
industries, textile industries, and metal industries, blanks
containing 26 questions, and received more than 5000 replies. The
questions referred to the pleasure and interest in the work, to
preferences, to fatigue, to the thoughts during the work, to the
means of recreation, to the attitude toward the wages, to the
emotional situation, and so on. The 5000 answers allowed manifold
classifications. The