In the discourses of our time on the lights and shades of our modern industrial life, all seem to agree that the monotony of industrial labor ought to be entered on the debit side of the ledger of civilization.  Since the days when factories began to spring up, the accusation that through the process of division of labor the industrial workingman no longer has any chance to see a whole product, but that he has to devote himself to the minutest part of a part, has remained one of the matter-of-course arguments.  The part of a part which he has to cut or polish or shape in endless repetition without alteration cannot awake any real interest.  This complete division of labor has to-day certainly gone far beyond anything which Adam Smith described, and therefore it now appears undeniable that the method must create a mental starvation which presses down the whole life of the laborer, deprives it of all joy in work, and makes the factory scheme a necessary but from the standpoint of psychology decidedly regrettable evil.  I have become more and more convinced that the scientific psychologist is not obliged to endorse this judgment of popular psychology.

To be sure the problem of division of labor, as it appears in the subdivision of manufacture, is intimately connected with many other related questions.  It quickly leads to the much larger question of division of labor in our general social structure, which is necessary for our social life with its vocational and professional demands, and which undoubtedly narrows to a certain degree every individual in the completeness of his human desires.  No man in modern society can devote himself to everything for which his mind may long.  But as a matter of course these large general problems of civilization lie outside of the realm of our present inquiry.  In another direction the problem of monotony comes very near to the question of fatigue.  But we must see clearly that these two questions are not identical and that we may discuss monotony here without arguing the problem of fatigue.  The frequent repetition of the same movement or of the same mental activity certainly may condition an objective fatigue, which may interfere with the economic output, but this is not the real meaning of the problem of monotony.  About fatigue we shall speak later.  Here we are concerned exclusively with that particular psychological attitude which we know as subjective dislike of uniformity and lack of change in the work.  Within these limits the question of monotony is, indeed, frequently misunderstood in its economic significance.

Let us not forget that the outsider can hardly ever judge when work offers or does not offer inner manifoldness.  If we do not know and really understand the subject, we are entirely unable to discriminate the subtler inner differences.  The shepherd knows every sheep, though the passer-by has the impression that they all look alike.  This inability to recognize the differences which the man at work feels distinctly