. At the beginning, he
reported, the work had sometimes been quite fatiguing, but later he
began to like it more and more. I imagined that this meant that at
first he had to do the work with full attention and that the complex
movement had slowly become automatic, allowing him to perform it like
a reflex movement and to turn his thoughts to other things. But he
explained to me in full detail that this was not the case, that he
still feels obliged to devote his thoughts entirely to the work at
hand, and that he is able only under these conditions to bring in the
daily wage which he needs for his family, as he is paid for every
thousand holes. But he added especially that it is not only the wage
which satisfies him, but that he takes decided pleasure in the
activity itself.

On the other hand, I not seldom found wage-earners, both men and
women, who seemed to have really interesting and varied activities and
who nevertheless complained bitterly over the monotonous, tiresome
factory labor. I became more and more convinced that the feeling of
monotony depends much less upon the particular kind of work than upon
the special disposition of the individual. It cannot be denied that
the same contrast exists in the higher classes of work. We find
school-teachers who constantly complain that it is intolerably
monotonous to go on teaching immature children the rudiments of
knowledge, while other teachers with exactly the same task before them
are daily inspired anew by the manifoldness of life in the classroom.
We find physicians who complain that one case in their practice is
like another, and judges who despair because they always have to deal
with the same petty cases, while other judges and physicians feel
clearly that every case offers something new and that the repetition
as such is neither conspicuous nor disagreeable. We find actors who
feel it a torture to play the same role every evening for several
weeks, and there are actors who, as one of the most famous actresses
assured me after the four hundredth performance of her star role,
repeat their parts many hundred times with undiminished interest,
because they feel that they are always speaking to new audiences. It
seems not impossible that this individual difference might be
connected with deeper-lying psychophysical conditions. I approached
the question, to be sure, with a preconceived theory. I fancied that
certain persons had a finer, subtler sense for differences tha