ical resolution, and to an action, and yet this is exactly the
opposite of the meaning of art. Art must inhibit action, if it is
perfect. The artist is not to make us believe that we deal with a real
object which suggests a practical attitude. The aesthetic forms are
adjusted to the main aesthetic aim, the inhibition of practical
desires. The display must be pleasant, tasteful, harmonious, and
suggestive, but should not be beautiful, if it is to fulfill its
purpose in the fullest sense. It loses its economic value, if by its
artistic quality it oversteps the boundaries of that middle region of
arts and crafts. This of course stands in no contradiction to the
requirement that the advertised article should be made to appear as
beautiful as possible. The presentation of something beautiful is not
necessarily a beautiful presentation, just as a perfectly beautiful
picture need not have something beautiful as its content. A perfect
painting may be the picture of a most ugly person.

We have not yet spoken of the suggestive power of the means of
propaganda. Every one knows the influence on taste and smell, on
social vanity, on local pride, on the gambling instinct, on the
instinctive fear of diseases, and above all on the sexual instinct,
can gain suggestive power. Everywhere among the uncritical masses such
appeals reach individuals whose psychophysical attitudes make such
influences vivid and overpowering. Every one knows, too, those often
clever linguistic forms which are to aid the suggestion. They are to
inhibit the opposing impulses. The mere use of the imperative, to be
sure, has gradually become an ineffective, used-up pattern. It is a
question for special economic psychotechnics to investigate how the
suggestive strength of a form can be reinforced or weakened by various
secondary influences. What influence, for example, belongs to the
electric sign advertisements in which the sudden change from light to
darkness produces strong psychophysical effects, and what value
belongs to moving parts in the picture?

The psychologist takes the same interest in the examples of window
displays, sample distributions, and similar vehicles of commerce by
which the offered articles themselves and not their mere picture or
description are to influence the consciousness of the prospective
customer. Here, too, every element may be isolated and may be brought
under psychotechnical rules. The most external question would refer to
the m