or reduction dependent upon the rapidity.  The right foot, for instance, remained nearest to the original movement at a rapidity of 80 motions in the minute, while the head did the same at about 20.  For a hand movement of 14 centimeters, the most favorable rapidity was 120 repetitions in the minute, while for a hand movement of 1 centimeter the average remained nearest to the standard at about 40 repetitions.  The mean variation from time average is the smallest for the left foot at 20 to 30 movements, for the right at 160 to 180, for the head at 40, for the larger hand movement at 180, and so on.  Investigations of this kind have so far not affected industrial life in the least, but it seems hardly doubtful that a systematic study of the movements necessary for economic work will have to pass through such strictly experimental phases.  The essential point, however, will be for the managers of the industrial concerns and the psychological laboratory workers really to come nearer to each other from the start and undertake the work in common, not in the sense that the laboratory is to emigrate to the factory, but in the better sense that definite questions which grow out of the industrial life be submitted to the scientific investigation of the psychologists.

XVI

EXPERIMENTS ON THE PROBLEM OF MONOTONY

The systematic organization of movements with most careful regard to the psychophysical conditions appeared to us the most momentous aid toward the heightening of efficiency.  But even if the superfluous, unfit, and interfering movement impulses were eliminated and the conditions of work completely adjusted to the demands of psychology, there would still remain a large number of possibilities through which productiveness might be greatly decreased, or at least kept far below the possible maximum of efficiency.  For instance, even the best adapted labor might be repeated to the point of exhaustion, at which the workman and the work would be ruined.  Fatigue and restoration accordingly demand especial consideration.  In a similar way emotions may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one ought to underestimate the importance of higher motives, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychophysical impulses of the laborer.  If these higher demands are satisfied, the whole system gains a new tonus, and if they are disappointed, the irritation of the mental machinery may do more harm than any break in the physical machine at which the man is working.  In short, we must still look in various directions to become aware of all the relations between the psychological factors and the economic output.  We may begin with one question which plays a large, perhaps too large, role in the economic and especially in the popular economic literature.  I refer to the problem of monotony of labor.