them as well. They may find out when
they are favored with a special talent for art or music or
scholarship, but they hardly ever know that their attention, or their
memory, or their will, or their intellectual apprehension, or their
sensory perceptions, are unusually developed in a particular
direction; yet such an exceptional mental disposition might be the
cause of special success in certain vocations. But we may abstract
from the extremes of abnormal deficiency and abnormal overdevelopment
in particular functions. Between them we find the broad region of the
average minds with their numberless variations, and these variations
are usually quite unknown to their possessors. It is often surprising
to see how the most manifest differences of psychical organization
remain unnoticed by the individuals themselves. Men with a pronounced
visual type of memory and men with a marked acoustical type may live
together without the slightest idea that their contents of
consciousness are fundamentally different from each other. Neither the
children nor their parents nor their teachers burden themselves with
the careful analysis of such actual mental qualities when the choice
of a vocation is before them. They know that a boy who is completely
unmusical must not become a musician, and that the child who cannot
draw at all must not become a painter, just as on physical grounds a
boy with very weak muscles is not fit to become a blacksmith. But as
soon as the subtler differentiation is needed, the judgment of all
concerned seems helpless and the physical characteristics remain
disregarded.

A further reason for the lack of adaptation, and surely a most
important one, lies in the fact that the individual usually knows only
the most external conditions of the vocations from which he chooses.
The most essential requisite for a truly perfect adaptation, namely, a
real analysis of the vocational demands with reference to the
desirable personal qualities, is so far not in existence. The young
people generally see some superficial traits of the careers which seem
to stand open, and, besides, perhaps they notice the great rewards of
the most successful. The inner labor, the inner values, and the inner
difficulties and frictions are too often unknown to those who decide
for a vocation, and they are unable to correlate those essential
factors of the life-calling with all that nature by inheritance, and
society by surroundings and training, hav