We must first find the
exact facts concerning the influence of alcohol on elementary
processes of mental life, such as perception, attention, memory, and
so on, and this will slowly prepare the way for the complete economic
experiment.
At present the greatest significance for the economic field may be
attached to those alcohol experiments which dealt with the
apprehension of the outer world. They proved a reduction in the
ability to grasp the impressions and a narrowing of the span of
consciousness. The indubitable decrease of certain memory powers, of
the acuity in measuring distance, of the time estimation, and similar
psychical disturbances after alcohol, must evidently be of high
importance for industry and transportation, while the well-known
increase of the purely sensory sensibility, especially of the visual
acuity after small closes of alcohol, hardly plays an important role
in practical life. The best-known and experimentally most studied
effect of alcohol, the increase of motor excitability, also evidently
has its importance for industrial achievements. It cannot be denied
that this facility of the motor impulses after small doses of alcohol
is not a real gain, which might be utilized economically, but is
ultimately an injury to the apparatus, even if we abstract from the
retardation of the reaction which comes as an after-effect. The
alcoholic facilitation, after all, reduces the certainty and the
perfection of the reaction and creates conditions under which wrong,
and this in economic life means often dangerous, motor responses
arise.
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