If such a programme is to be realized in detail,
it will be necessary to discriminate carefully, between those mental
traits of the personality which must be accredited to a lasting
inherited disposition and such as have been developed under the
influences of the surroundings, by education and training, by bad or
good stimuli from the community. While those acquired traits may have
become relatively lasting dispositions, their transformation is, after
all, possible, and the limits in which changes may be expected will
have to be found out by exact studies. Individual psychological
rhythm, attention and emotion, memory and will energy, disposition to
fatigue and to restoration, imagination, suggestibility and
initiative, and many other features will have to be examined in their
relation to the special economic aims.
Too much emphasis cannot be laid on another function as well, the
experimental testing of which has only recently been started. I refer
to the difference in the individual ability of men to profit from
training. If we test an individual at a certain point in his life with
regard to a variable ability, our result must be dependent upon three
factors, the original disposition for the performance, the original
disposition for the advance by training, and the training itself
actually passed through up to that moment. A small amount of
antecedent training for the particular task together with a high
ability to profit from repetition may be a better reason for the
appointment of a man than a long training with small ability to profit
from schooling, in spite of the fact that his actual achievement at
this time may be in the first case smaller than in the second.
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