activity demands the attentive observation of one little lever or one wheel at one point, while the other demands that half a dozen large machines be simultaneously supervised, all that is necessary is to find the man with the right type of attention for each place.  It would be utterly arbitrary to claim that the expansive type of attention is economically more or less valuable than the concentrated type.  Both in English and in German we have a long popular series of pamphlets with descriptions of the requirements and conditions for the various occupations to which a boy or a girl may turn, but I have nowhere found any reference to the most essential mental functions such as the particular kind of attention or memory or will.  These pamphlets are always cut after the same pattern.  Where the detail refers at all to the mental side, it points only to particular knowledge which may be learned in school or trade or work, or to abilities which may be developed by training.  But the individual differences which are set by the particular conditions and dispositions of the mind are neglected with surprising uniformity in the vocational literature of all countries.  The time seems ripe for at last filling this blank in the consciousness of the nation and in the institutions of the land.

PART II

THE BEST POSSIBLE WORK

XIII

LEARNING AND TRAINING

We have placed our psychotechnical interest at the service of economic tasks.  We therefore had to start from the various economic purposes and had to look backward, asking what ways might lead to these goals.  All our studies so far were in this sense subordinated to the one task which ought to be the primary one in the economic world, and yet which has been most ignored.  The purpose before us was to find for every economic occupation the best-fitted personality, both in the interest of economic success and in the interest of personal development.  Individual traits under this point of view become for us the decisive psychological factors, and experimental psychology had to show us a method to determine those personal differences and their relation to the demands for industrial efficiency.  This first goal may be reached with all the means of science, as we hope it will be in the future, or everything may be left to unscientific, haphazard methods as in the past:  in any case a second task stands before the community, namely, the securing of the best possible work from every man in his place.  Indeed, the nation cannot delay the solution of this second problem until the first has been solved in a satisfactory way.  We might even say that the answer to the second question is the more important, the less satisfactory the answer to the first is.  If every place in the economic world were filled only by those who are perfectly adapted by their mental traits, it would be much less difficult to get efficient work from everyone.  The fact that so many misfits are at work makes it such an urgent necessity to find ways and means by which the efficiency can be heightened.