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a time of distress. Such things ought not to be. The natural leaders of public opinion are those whose social advantages have ensured to them the means of being the best educated, the most deeply read, the most widely travelled, the most variously experienced members of the community. They have, and will always have, the greatest opportunities of exercising beneficent influence on public life, if they behave, in private as well as in public, with a due sense of responsibility. Lady Gwendolen Cecil, in the "Life of the Marquis of Salisbury," prints a letter from Lord Robert Cecil (as he then was), written from New Zealand to his father regarding the choice of a career. The young man had been on a journey around the world for his health, and was now coming home. He had to make up his mind what he should do," assuming, as you then said, that in choosing some plan of life, the prospect of the greatest usefulness ought to be the only guiding principle of selection." In all public crises, Society has usually shown a respect for the duty of "usefulness"; but in private life, perhaps, some return to seventeenth century puritanism, dignified, generous, but not extravagant, would confirm the influence of Society on the life of the nation.

R. B. MOWAT

OUR NEGLECT OF PSYCHOLOGY

PSYCHOLOGY is at once the oldest and the youngest of the

sciences. It is the oldest in that a systematic study of the mental functions of men and animals was made by Aristotle, and with such success that the psychology fashioned by him was more deserving of the name of a science than any other body of natural knowledge at that time. It is the youngest of the sciences in that it is still struggling for recognition in the academic world, and is not yet accorded its due place and influence within our western civilization. Progress towards such recognition, place, and influence has been made in very different degrees among the various nations; and in this respect Great Britain lags far behind many other countries. The fact hardly needs illustration; I will merely remark that in the universities of Germany there are many professors of psychology, and in those of the United States there are some hundreds; while in the whole of Great Britain, there are, I believe, two only.

It is of more interest to point to the consequences and causes of this neglect. I insist first upon what seems to me the most immediately disastrous but least recognised of such consequences, namely in the sphere of economics and industry. The recent strikes, the vast number of unemployed workmen, the persisting stagnation of many industries in Great Britain, contrast painfully with the steady economic recovery of the European nations and the abounding, the almost excessive, prosperity of the United States. It is especially the industrial progress of America that challenges comparison, that urgently raises the question, " Why this difference? Why so much of progress and prosperity there ? Why so little here?"

The abounding prosperity of America arises from many contributing conditions; but there is one which stands out prominently and is as conspicuously lacking in Great Britain, namely, the harmonious co-operation between management and employees. The fact is becoming known to English observers. Sir Alfred Mond, on returning from a recent visit to America, is cited by the press as saying: "Another great factor in American business

life is that employers and workmen understand each other to their mutual benefit." It is not long since America also was the scene of many bitter industrial conflicts; but the art of management has been making rapid progress of late years. The superficial explanation of this American phenomenon is that industrial prosperity leads to the payment of high wages which produce contentment among the wage-earners. But this inverts the true causal sequence. It is rather the harmony between employers and employed, and the consequent free and effective output of energy by both, which render possible the payment of high wages and large dividends. Industrial experience during the war showed clearly the all-predominating influence of this condition. Relatively small numbers of relatively unskilled, untrained workers proved themselves capable of a vast productivity; because they worked in a spirit of harmonious co-operation with the management, impelled by the same strong motives.

But the further question arises: how has American industry achieved this harmony and this consequently increased productiveness? And the answer can only be that American management has realized, has come to recognise and believe in, the importance of the psychological factors; has learnt to give them careful consideration. The fact might be illustrated in many ways. Many firms employ psychologically trained experts to study their personnel, to sort out the square pegs and put them in square holes, to detect and to remove causes of friction and discontent-those thousand and one small causes which are as so much sand thrown among the wheels of a delicate machine. The universities are recognising the importance of this work. Harvard, for example, has recently appointed to a chair in her great business school Mr. Elton Mayo, a British subject who has made his name as a distinguished expert in the field of industrial psychology and who, having sought in vain for scope for his special knowledge within the British Empire, has transferred his services to America. Perhaps the most striking illustration is afforded by the work of my friend, Mr. Whiting Williams. Mr. Williams has spent years in making intimate studies of the psychology of artisans and labourers, working beside them just as one of themselves; and now he is invited by Harvard and other leading universities to lecture to their students, to give them the benefit of his observations and reflections. How delicate, how important, how pro

ductive such work may be is well shown in Mr. Williams' last book, "The Mainsprings of Men." In this book, without delaying to explode that monstrous fiction which so long has dominated British economics, the economic man, Mr. Williams reveals the importance of a multitude of obscure and delicate motives working in the bosoms of the horny-handed sons of toil, motives entirely unrecognised by British economists, yet allimportant factors of industry.

If the economic superiority of the United States is largely due to the fact that American management has learnt to give due consideration to the all-important psychological factors of industry, how are we to account for the fact? There can be, I submit, only one explanation, namely that in America psychology is everywhere recognised and believed in. It permeates the social atmosphere; it is studied every year by many thousands of young men and women, both in the universities and colleges and in many courses of popular lectures and in popular books and magazines, which, though they may not always impart strictly scientific knowledge, do at least diffuse throughout the people a sense of the importance of the imponderable factors of human life and intercourse. The British attitude towards these imponderables remains one of ignorant scepticism. It was well illustrated by the sneers of the British press when recently M. Poincaré proposed to arrest the fall of the franc and France's headlong course towards national bankruptcy by taking due account of the psychological factors in the situation, in a word, by restoring confidence in the power of the government to deal with the difficulties which confronted it.

Not only in the sphere of industrial relations, but also in the whole vast realm of economics and politics, the need for the psychological view-point is urgent. British economics, content with its fiction of the economic man, has assumed that, if only men grow rich in material possessions, all else will be added to them in due time; ignoring the thousand and one subtle needs and desires without satisfaction of which the average sensual man, no matter how rich, cannot be happy. Strongly influencing the legislative policies of Great Britain, this economic doctrine has played no small part in reducing our country to its present condition, a condition in which a lamentably large proportion of its population is herded in cities quite unfit for human habitation;

is dependent for the satisfaction of its most fundamental and strictly economic needs upon world-conditions over which it has no control; is denied all opportunity for the due exercise and satisfaction of less obvious but no less intrinsic tendencies, the possession of which differentiates its members so widely from "the economic man."

All politics and all economics, like all education and most of medicine, must deal at every point with problems that are mainly psychological. It will be long before this elementary truth may gain general recognition in Great Britain. Yet there are signs of progress. For aught I know there are still British economists who continue to repeat the old nonsense implied by the phrase, "the iron laws of political economy." One British economist, however, Mr. J. A. Hobson, has recently discovered the truth and announced it in his last book, " Free Thought in the Social Sciences," boldly proclaiming that the adoption of the modern psychological view-point by the social sciences is already bringing about a radical transformation of them all. There are other signs of progress in the same direction. The National Institute of Industrial Psychology, which owes its existence to the initiative of Dr. C. S. Myers, seems to have found its feet and to be enlisting the interest of a number of British industrialists. Many books on psychology find British readers. At the last meeting of the British Association, the recently instituted section of psychology attracted, I believe, much larger audiences than any other. The British Psychological Society, which was originated a score of years ago as a small group of persons centred round my laboratory at University College, London, has become a flourishing society boasting nearly a thousand members. In short, a considerable part of the educated public is keenly interested in psychology. Why, then, do our universities continue to neglect so grossly this, the most difficult and the most important of the sciences, and therefore the one that most needs for its development and application that guidance which only the universities can give?

The answer to this question is three-fold. First, psychology is both science and philosophy. That is to say, it is a science which the student cannot pursue without confronting again and again problems which are commonly regarded as belonging to the field of philosophy. And, just because it is both science and philosophy, it is treated by the universities as neither one nor

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