tion, to what extent, and under
what conditions, it is possible to enlist in the services of industry
motives which are not purely economic, can be ascertained only after a
study of the psychology of work which has not yet been made. Such a
study, to be of value, must start by abandoning the conventional
assumptions, popularized by economic textbooks and accepted as
self-evident by practical men, that the motives to effort are simple
and constant in character, like the pressure of steam in a boiler, that
they are identical throughout all ranges of economic activity, from the
stock exchange to the shunting of wagons or laying of bricks, and that
they can be elicited and strengthened only by directly economic
incentives. In so far as motives in industry have been considered
hitherto, it has usually been done {156} by writers who, like most
exponents of scientific management, have started by assuming that the
categories of business psychology could be offered with equal success
to all classes of workers and to all types of productive work. Those
categories appear to be derived from a simplified analysis of the
mental processes of the company promoter, financier or investor, and
their validity as an interpretation of the motives and habits which
determine the attitude to his work of the bricklayer, the miner, the
dock laborer or the engineer, is precisely the point in question.

Clearly there are certain types of industry to which they are only
partially relevant. It can hardly be assumed, for example, that the
degree of skill and energy brought to his work by a surgeon, a
scientific investigator, a teacher, a medical officer of health, an
Indian civil servant and a peasant proprietor are capable of being
expressed precisely and to the same degree in terms of the economic
advantage which those different occupations offer. Obviously those who
pursue them are influenced to some considerable, though uncertain,
extent by economic incentives. Obviously, again, the precise character
of each process or step in the exercise of their respective avocations,
the performance of an operation, the carrying out of a piece of
investigation, the selection of a particular type of educational
method, the preparation of a report, the decision of a case or the care
of live stock, is not immediately dependent upon an exact calculation
of pecuniary gain or loss. What appears to be the case is that in
certain walks of life, while the occupa