IMPORTANCE OF THE INCENTIVE.—­The part that the incentive plays in the doing of all work is enormous.  This is true in learning, and also in the performance of work which is the result of this learning:  manual work and mental work as well.  The business man finishing his work early that he may go to the baseball game; the boy at school rushing through his arithmetic that he may not be kept after school; the piece-worker, the amount of whose day’s pay depends upon the quantity and quality he can produce; the student of a foreign language preparing for a trip abroad,—­these all illustrate the importance of the incentive as an element in the amount which is to be accomplished.

TWO KINDS OF INCENTIVES.—­The incentive may be of two kinds:  it may be first of all, a return, definite or indefinite, which is to be received when a certain portion of the work is done, or it may be an incentive due to the working conditions themselves.  The latter case is exemplified where two people are engaged in the same sort of work and start in to race one another to see who can accomplish the most, who can finish the fixed amount in the shortest space of time, or who can produce the best quality.  The incentive may be in the form of some definite aim or goal which is understood by the worker himself, or it may be in some natural instinct which is roused by the work, either consciously to the worker, or consciously to the man who is assigning the work, or consciously to both, or consciously to neither one.  In any of these cases it is a natural instinct that is being appealed to and that induces the man to do more work, whether he sees any material reward for that work or not.

DEFINITIONS OF TWO TYPES.—­We may call the incentive which utilizes the natural instinct, “direct incentive,” and the incentive which utilizes these secondarily, through some set reward or punishment, “indirect incentive.”  This, at first sight, may seem a contradictory use of terms—­it may seem that the reward would be the most direct of incentives; yet a moment’s thought will cause one to realize that all the reward can possibly do is to arouse in the individual a natural instinct which will lead him to increase his work.

INDIRECT INCENTIVES INCLUDE TWO CLASSES.—­We will discuss the indirect incentives first as, contrary to the usual use of the word “indirect,” they are most easy to estimate and to describe.  They divide themselves into two classes, reward and punishment.

DEFINITION OF REWARD.—­Reward is defined by the Century Dictionary as—­“return, recompense, the fruit of one’s labor or works; profit,” with synonyms, “pay, compensation, remuneration, requital and retribution.”  Note particularly the word “retribution,” for it is this aspect of reward, that is, the just outcome of one’s act, that makes the reward justly include punishment.  The word “reward” exactly expresses what management would wish to be understood by the incentive that it gives its men to increase their work.