temporary reduction of the number of workmen.  But nobody can deny that this revolutionary movement has introduced most valuable suggestions which the industrial world cannot afford to ignore, and that as soon as exaggerations are avoided and experience has created a broader foundation, the principles of the new theory will prove of lasting value.  We shall have to discuss, at a later point, various special features of the system, especially the highly interesting motion study.  Here we have to deal only with those tendencies of the movement and with those interests which point toward our present problem, the mental analysis of the individual employees in order to avoid misfits.

The approach to this problem, indeed, seems unavoidable for the students of scientific management, as its goal is an organization of economic work by which the waste of energy will be avoided and the greatest increase in the efficiency of the industrial enterprise will be reached.  The recognition that this can never be effected by a mere excessive driving of the workingmen belongs to its very presuppositions.  The illusory means of prolongation of the working-time and similar devices by which the situation of the individual deteriorates would be out of the question; on the contrary, the heightening of the individual’s joy in the work and of the personal satisfaction in one’s total life development belongs among the most important, indirect agencies of the new scheme.  This end is reached by many characteristic changes in the division of labor; also by a new division between supervisors and workers, by transformations of the work itself and of the tools and vehicles.  But as a by-product of these efforts the demand necessarily arose for means by which the fit individuals could be found for special kinds of labor.  The more scientific management introduced changes, by which the individual achievement often had to become rather complicated and difficult, the more it became necessary to study the skill and the endurance and the intelligence of the individual laborers in order to entrust these new difficult tasks only to the most appropriate men in the factories and mills.  The problem of individual selection accordingly forced itself on the new efficiency engineers, and they naturally recognized that the really essential traits and dispositions were the mental ones.  In the most progressive books of the new movement, this need of emphasizing the selection of workers with reference to their mental equipment comes to clear expression.

Yet this is very far from a real application of scientific psychology to the problem at hand.  Wherever the question of the selection of the fit men after psychological principles is mentioned in the literature of this movement, the language becomes vague, and the same men, who use the newest scientific knowledge whenever physics or mathematics or physiology or chemistry are involved, make hardly any attempts to introduce the results of science when psychology is in question.