The first way offers many conveniences.
There we should begin with the mental states of attention, memory,
feeling, and so on, and should study how the psychological knowledge
of every one of these mental states can render service in many
different practical fields. The attention, for instance, is important
in the classroom when the teacher tries to secure the attention of the
pupils, but the judge expects the same attention from the jurymen in
the courtroom, the artist seeks to stir up the attention of the
spectator, the advertiser demands the attention of the newspaper
readers. Whoever studies the characteristics of the mental process of
attention may then be able to indicate how in every one of these
unlike cases the attention can be stimulated and retained.
Nevertheless the opposite way which starts from the tasks to be
fulfilled seems more helpful and more fundamentally significant. The
question, then, is what mental processes become important for the
tasks of education, what for the purposes of the courtroom, what for
the hospital, what for the church, what for politics, and so on.
As this whole essay is to be devoted exclusively to the economic
problems, we are obliged to choose the second way; that is, to arrange
applied psychology with reference to its chief ends and not with
reference to the various means. But the same question comes up in the
further subdivision of the material.
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