The well-known subjective illusory feeling of the subjects was not lacking; they themselves believed that the wine had reinforced their working power.  As soon as such experiments are put into the service of economic life, they will have to be carried on with much more accurate adjustment to the special conditions, with subtler gradation of the stimuli, and especially with careful study of individual factors.  But at first it seems more in the interest of the practical task that the extremely complicated problem of the influence of alcohol be followed up by purely theoretical research in the laboratory in order that the effect may be resolved into its various components.  We must first find the exact facts concerning the influence of alcohol on elementary processes of mental life, such as perception, attention, memory, and so on, and this will slowly prepare the way for the complete economic experiment.

At present the greatest significance for the economic field may be attached to those alcohol experiments which dealt with the apprehension of the outer world.  They proved a reduction in the ability to grasp the impressions and a narrowing of the span of consciousness.  The indubitable decrease of certain memory powers, of the acuity in measuring distance, of the time estimation, and similar psychical disturbances after alcohol, must evidently be of high importance for industry and transportation, while the well-known increase of the purely sensory sensibility, especially of the visual acuity after small closes of alcohol, hardly plays an important role in practical life.  The best-known and experimentally most studied effect of alcohol, the increase of motor excitability, also evidently has its importance for industrial achievements.  It cannot be denied that this facility of the motor impulses after small doses of alcohol is not a real gain, which might be utilized economically, but is ultimately an injury to the apparatus, even if we abstract from the retardation of the reaction which comes as an after-effect.  The alcoholic facilitation, after all, reduces the certainty and the perfection of the reaction and creates conditions under which wrong, and this in economic life means often dangerous, motor responses arise.  The energy of the motor discharge suffers throughout from the alcohol.

Some experiments which were recently carried on with reference to the influence of alcohol on the power of will seem to have especial significance for the field of economic activity.  The method applied in the experiment was the artificial creation of an exactly measurable resistance to the will-impulse directed toward a purpose.  The experiment had to determine what power of resistance could be overcome by the will and how far this energy changes under the influence of alcohol.  For this end combinations of meaningless syllables were learned and repeated until they formed a close connection in memory.  If one syllable was given, the mechanical tendency