tional
activities has given every evidence that even the oldest functions are
performed in an impractical, inefficient way. The students of
scientific management have demonstrated how the work of the mason, as
old as civilization itself, is carried on every day in every land with
methods which can be improved at once, as soon as a scientific study
of the motions themselves is started. It could hardly be otherwise,
and the principle might be illustrated by any chance case. If a girl
were left to herself to learn typewriting, the best way would seem to
her to be to pick out the letters with her two forefingers. She would
slowly seek the right key for each letter and press it down. In this
way she would be in the pleasant position of producing a little letter
after only half an hour of trial. As soon as she has succeeded with
such a first half page, she will see only the one goal of increasing
the rapidity and accuracy, and by hard training she will indeed gain
steadily in speed and correctness, and after a year she will write
rather quickly. Yet she will never succeed in reaching the ideal
proficiency. In order to attain the highest point, she ought to have
started with an entirely different method. She ought to have begun at
once to use all her fingers, and, moreover, to use them without
looking at the keyboard. If she had started with this difficult method
she would never have succeeded in writing a letter the first day. It
would have taken weeks to reach that achievement which the simpler
method yields almost at once. But in plodding along on this harder
road she would finally outdistance the competitor with the commonsense
method and would finally gain the highest degree of efficiency. This
is exactly the situation everywhere. Commonsense always grasps for
those methods which quickly lead to a modest success, but which can
never lead to maximum achievement. On the other hand, up to the days
of modern experimental psychology the interest was not focussed on the
mental operations involved in industrial life as such. Everything was
left to commonsense, and therefore it is not surprising that the
farmhand like the workingman in the mill has never hit upon the one
method which is best, as all his instincts and natural tendencies had
to lead him to the second or third best method, since these alone give
immediate results.

A highly educated man who spent his youth in a corn-raising community
reports to me the following psy