$100,000 feels the gain or loss of $1000.  Not the absolute amount of the difference, but the relative value of the increase or decrease is the decisive influence on the psychological effect.  Some experimental investigations concerning feelings have also come near to the economic boundaries.  The study of the contrast feelings and of the relativity of feelings, for instance, has points of contact with the economic problem of how far economic progress, with its stirring up and satisfying of continually new demands, really adds to the quantity of human enjoyment.  In other words, how far are those sociologists right who are convinced that by the technical complexity of modern life, with all its comforts and mechanizations, the level of individual life is raised, but that the oscillations about this average level remain the same and produce the same amount of pleasure and pain?  The technical advance would therefore bring no increase of human pleasure.

We might also put into this class the meagre experimental investigations concerning the mutual influence of feelings.  When sound, light, and touch impressions, each of which, isolated, produces a feeling of a certain degree, are combined with one another, the experiment can show very characteristic changes in the intensity of pleasure and displeasure.  From such routine experiments of the laboratory it might not be difficult to come to more complex experiments on the mutual relations of feeling values and especially of the combinations of pleasure with displeasure.  This would lead to an insight into the processes which are involved in the fixing of prices, as they are always dependent upon the pleasure in the acquisition and the displeasure in the outlay.  The exact psychology of the future may thus very well determine the conditions under which the best effects for the satisfaction of economic demands may be secured, but our present-day science is still far from such an achievement:  and it seems hardly justifiable to propose methods to-day, as it would be like drawing a map with detailed paths for a primeval forest which is still inaccessible.

XX

EXPERIMENTS ON THE EFFECTS OF ADVERTISEMENTS

We have said that the time has not yet come for discussing from the standpoint of experimental psychology the means to secure the ultimate effects of economic life, namely, the satisfaction of economic demands.  If this were the only effect which had economic significance, this whole last part of our little book would have to remain a blank, as we wanted to deal here with the securing of the best effects after having studied the securing of the best man and of the best work.  Yet these ultimate ends are certainly not the only mental effects which become important in the course of economic processes.  In order to reach that final end of the economic movement, often an unlimited number of part processes distributed over space and