have been introduced under the pressure of modern philanthropic ideas.  The lounging-rooms with the newspapers and periodicals the clubrooms with libraries, the excursions and dances and patriotic festivities, fill up the reservoir of psychophysical energies.  As a matter of course all the social movements which enhance the consciousness of solidarity among the laborers and the feeling of security as to their future development in their career have a similar effect of reinforcing the normal psychical achievement.

As the strongest factor, finally, the direct material interest must be added to these conditions.  The literature of political economy is full of discussions of the effect of increase of wages, of the payment of bonuses and premiums, of piece-wages, of promised pensions, and, as far as Europe is concerned, of state insurance.  In short, the whole individual financial situation in its relation to the psychophysical achievement of the wage-earner is a favorite topic of economic inquiry.  We cannot participate here in these inexhaustible discussions, because all these questions are to-day still so endlessly far from the field of psychological experiments.  Nevertheless we ought not to forget the experience through which general experimental psychology has gone in the last few decades.  When the first experiments were undertaken in order to deal systematically with the mental life, the friends of this new science and its opponents agreed, on the whole, in the belief that certainly only the most elementary phenomena of consciousness, the sensations and the reactions of impulses, would be accessible to the new method.  The opponents naturally compared this modest field with the great problems of the mental totality, and therefore ridiculed the new narrow task as unimportant.  The friends, on the other hand, were eager to follow the fresh path, because they were content to gain real exactitude by the experiment at least in these simplest questions.  Yet as soon as the new independent workshops were established for the young science, it was discovered that the method was able to open fields in which no one had anticipated its usefulness.  The experiments turned to the problems of attention, of memory, of imagination, of feeling, of judgment, of character, of aesthetic experience and so on.  It is not improbable that the method of the economic psychological experiment may also quickly lead beyond the more elementary problems, as soon as it is systematically applied, and then it, too, may conquer regions of inquiry in which to-day no exact calculation of the psychological factors seems possible.