continuously observed with reference to their rapidity and direction
in the quickly changing panorama of the street. Moving figures come
from the right and from the left toward and across the track, and are
embedded in a stream of men and vehicles which moves parallel to the
track. In the face of such manifoldness there are men whose impulses
are almost inhibited and who instinctively desire to wait for the
movement of the nearest objects; they would evidently be unfit for the
service, as they would drive the electric car far too slowly. There
are others who, even with the car at high speed, can adjust themselves
for a time to the complex moving situation, but whose attention soon
lapses, and while they are fixating a rather distant carriage, may
overlook a pedestrian who carelessly crosses the track immediately in
front of their car. In short, we have a great variety of mental types
of this characteristic unified activity, which may be understood as a
particular combination of attention and imagination.

My effort was to transplant this activity of the motormen into
laboratory processes. And here I may include a remark on the
methodology of psychological industrial experiments. One might
naturally think that the experience of a special industrial
undertaking would be best reproduced for the experiment by repeating
the external conditions in a kind of miniature form. That would mean
that we ought to test the motormen of the electric railway by
experiments with small toy models of electric cars placed on the
laboratory table. But this would be decidedly inappropriate. A reduced
copy of an external apparatus may arouse ideas, feelings, and
volitions which have little in common with the processes of actual
life. The presupposition would be that the man to be tested for any
industrial achievement would have to think himself into the miniature
situation, and especially uneducated persons are often very