This method of practical life in which we seek to express and to understand a meaning, and relate every will-act to its aim, is not confined to the mere popular aspect; it can lead to very systematic scholarly treatment. It is exactly the treatment which is fundamental in the case of all history, for example, or of law, or of logic. That is, the historian makes us understand the meaning of a personality of the past and is really interested in past events only as far as human needs are to be interpreted. It would be pseudo-psychology, if we called such an account in the truly historical spirit a psychological description and explanation. The student of law interprets the meaning of the will of the legislator; he does not deal with the idea of the law as a psychological content. And the logician has nothing to do with the idea as a conscious object in the mind; he asks as to the inner relations of it and as to the conclusions from the premises. In short, wherever historical interpretations or logical deductions are needed, we move on in the sphere of human life as it presents itself from the standpoint of immediate true experience without artificially moulding it into the conceptions of psychology. On the other hand, as soon as the psychological method is applied, this immediate life meaning of human experience is abandoned, and instead of it is gained the possibility of considering the whole experience as a system of causes and effects. Mental life is then no longer what it is to us in our daily intercourse, because it is reconstructed for the purposes of this special treatment, just as the water which we drink is no longer our beverage if we consider it under the point of view of chemistry as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Hence we have not two statements one of which is true and the other ultimately untrue; on the contrary, both are true. We have a perfect right to give the value of truth to our experience with water as a refreshing drink, and also to the formula of the chemist. With a still better right we may claim that both kinds of mental experience are equally true. Hence not a word of objection is raised against the discussions of the historians and the philosophers, if we insist that their so-called psychology stands outside of the really descriptive and explanatory account of mental life, and is therefore not psychology in the technical sense of the word.
It is this historical attitude which controls all the studies of the political economists. They speak of the will-acts of the individuals and of their demands and desires and satisfactions, but they do not describe and explain them; they want to interpret and understand them. They may analyze the motives of the laborer or of the manufacturer, but those motives and impulses interest them not as contents of consciousness, but only as acts which are directed toward a goal. The aim toward which these point by their meaning, and not the elements from which they are made up or their causes and effects, is the substance of such economic studies. For such a subjective account of the meaning of actions the only problem is, indeed, the correct understanding and interpretation, and the consistent psychologist who knows that it is not his task to interpret but to explain has no right to raise any questions here. It is, therefore, only a confusing disturbance, if a really psychological, causal explanation is mixed into the interpretation of such a system of will-acts and purposes. It is true we find this confusion in many modern works on economics. Economists know that a scientific explanatory study of the human mind exists, and they have a vague feeling that they have no right to ignore this real psychology, instead of recognizing that the psychology really has nothing to do with their particular problem. The result is that they constantly try to discuss the impulses and instincts, the hunger and thirst and sexual desire, and the higher demands for fighting and playing and acquiring, for seeking power and social influence, as a psychologist would discuss them, referring them to biological and physiological conditions and explaining them causally. Yet as soon as they come to their real problems and enter into the interpretation and meaning of these economic energies, they naturally slide back into the historical, economic point of view and discuss the economic relations of men without any reference to their psychologizing preambles. The application of the psychological, scientific method to the true economic experience is therefore not secured at all in this way. The demands and volitions which they disentangle are not the ones which the psychophysiologist studies, because they are left in their immediate form of life reality. They are accordingly inaccessible to the point of view of experimental psychology, and nothing can be expected from such interpretative discussions of the economists for the psychotechnics at which the psychologist is aiming. Even where the political economists deal with the problems of value in exact language, nothing is gained for the kind of insight for which the psychologist hopes, and the psychologists must therefore go on with their own methods, if they are ever to reach a causal understanding of the means by which a satisfaction of the economic demands may be effected.
So far the psychologists have not even started to examine these economic feelings, demands, and satisfactions with the means of laboratory psychology. Hence no one can say beforehand how it ought to be done and how to gain access to the important problems, inasmuch as the right formulation of the problem and the selection of the right method would here as everywhere be more than half of the solution. It must be left to the development of science for the right starting-point and the right methods to be discovered. Sometimes, to be sure, the experiment has at least approached this group of economic questions. For instance, the investigations of the so-called psychophysical law have often been brought into contact with the experiences of ownership and acquirement. The law, well known to every student of psychology, is that the differences of intensity in two pairs of sensations are felt as equal, when the two pairs of stimuli are standing in the same relation. The difference between the intensities of the light sensations from 10 candles and 11 candles is equal to that from 50 candles and 55 candles, from 100 candles and 110, from 500 candles and 550: that is, the difference of one additional candle between 10 and 11 appears just as great as the difference of 50 candles between 500 and 550. The psychologists have claimed that in a corresponding way the same feeling of difference arises when the amounts of possessions stand in the same relation. That is, the man who owns $100 feels the gain or loss of $1 as much as one who owns $100,000 feels the gain or loss of $1000. Not the absolute amount of the difference, but the relative value of the increase or decrease is the decisive influence on the psychological effect. Some experimental investigations concerning feelings have also come near to the economic boundaries. The study of the contrast feelings and of the relativity of feelings, for instance, has points of contact with the economic problem of how far economic progress, with its stirring up and satisfying of continually new demands, really adds to the quantity of human enjoyment. In other words, how far are those sociologists right who are convinced that by the technical complexity of modern life, with all its comforts and mechanizations, the level of individual life is raised, but that the oscillations about this average level remain the same and produce the same amount of pleasure and pain? The technical advance would therefore bring no increase of human pleasure.
We might also put into this class the meagre experimental investigations concerning the mutual influence of feelings. When sound, light, and touch impressions, each of which, isolated, produces a feeling of a certain degree, are combined with one another, the experiment can show very characteristic changes in the intensity of pleasure and displeasure. From such routine experiments of the laboratory it might not be difficult to come to more complex experiments on the mutual relations of feeling values and especially of the combinations of pleasure with displeasure. This would lead to an insight into the processes which are involved in the fixing of prices, as they are always dependent upon the pleasure in the acquisition and the displeasure in the outlay. The exact psychology of the future may thus very well determine the conditions under which the best effects for the satisfaction of economic demands may be secured, but our present-day science is still far from such an achievement: and it seems hardly justifiable to propose methods to-day, as it would be like drawing a map with detailed paths for a primeval forest which is still inaccessible.
XX
EXPERIMENTS ON THE EFFECTS OF ADVERTISEMENTS
We have said that the time has not yet come for discussing from the standpoint of experimental psychology the means to secure the ultimate effects of economic life, namely, the satisfaction of economic demands. If this were the only effect which had economic significance, this whole last part of our little book would have to remain a blank, as we wanted to deal here with the securing of the best effects after having studied the securing of the best man and of the best work. Yet these ultimate ends are certainly not the only mental effects which become important in the course of economic processes. In order to reach that final end of the economic movement, often an unlimited number of part processes distributed over space and time must coöperate. The satisfaction of our thirst in a tea-room may be a trivial illustration of such a final effect, but it is clear that in order to produce this ultimate mental effect of satisfying the thirst, thousands of economic processes must have preceded. To bring the tea and the sugar and the lemon to the table, the porcelain cup and the silver spoon, wage-earners, manufacturers and laborers, exporters, importers, storekeepers, salesmen, and customers had to coöperate. Among such part processes which serve the economic achievement are always many which succeed only if they produce characteristic effects in human minds. The propaganda which the storekeeper makes, for instance, his display and his posters, serve the economic interplay by psychical effects without themselves satisfying any ultimate economic demand. They must attract the passer-by or impress the reader or stimulate his impulse to buy, and through all this they reach an end which is in itself not final, as no human desire to read advertisements exists. When the salesman influences the customer to buy something which may later help to satisfy a real economic demand, the art of his suggestive words secures a mental effect which again is in itself not ultimate. If the manufacturer influences his employees to work with more attention or with greater industry, or if the community stirs up the desire for luxury or the tendency to saving, we have mental effects which are of economic importance without being really ultimate economic effects.
As far as these effects are necessary and justified stages leading to the ultimate satisfaction of economic demands, it certainly is the duty of applied psychology to bring psychological experience and exact methods into their service. We emphasize the necessary and justified character of these steps, as it is evident that psychological methods may be made use of also by those who aim toward mental effects which are unjustified and which are not necessary for the real satisfaction of valuable demands. Psychological laws can also be helpful in fraudulent undertakings or in advertisements for unfair competition. The psychotechnical scientist cannot be blamed if the results of his experiments are misused for immoral purposes, just as the chemist is not responsible if chemical knowledge is applied to the construction of anarchistic bombs. But while psychology, as we have emphasized before, cannot from its own point of view determine the value of the end, the psychologist as a human being is certainly willing to coöperate only where the soundness and correctness of the ends are evident from the point of view of social welfare.
In order to demonstrate the principle of this kind of psychotechnical help with fuller detail, at least by one illustration, I may discuss the case of the advertisements, the more as this problem has already been taken up in a somewhat systematic way by the psychological laboratories. We have a number of careful experimental investigations referring to the memory-value, the attention-value, the suggestion-value, and other mental effects of the printed business advertisements. Of course this group of experimental investigations at once suggests an objection which we cannot ignore. A business advertisement, as it appears in the newspapers, is such an extremely trivial thing and so completely devoted to the egotistical desire for profit that it seems undignified for the scientist to spend his time on such nothings and to shoot sparrows with his laboratory cannon-balls. But on the one side nothing can be unworthy of thorough study from a strictly theoretical point of view. The dirtiest chemical substance may become of greatest importance for chemistry, and the ugliest insect for zoölogy. On the other side, if the practical point of view of the applied sciences is taken, the importance of the inquiry may stand in direct relation to the intensity of the human demand which is to be satisfied by the new knowledge. Present-day society is so organized that the economic advertisement surely serves a need, and its intensity is expressed by the well-known fact that in every year billions are paid for advertising. Measured by the amount of expenditure, advertising has become one of the largest and economically most important human industries. It is, then, not astonishing that scientists consider it worth while to examine the exact foundations of this industry, but it is surprising that this industry could reach such an enormous development without being guided by the spirit of scientific exactitude which appears a matter of course in every other large business. As it is a function of science to study the physics of incandescent lamps or gas motors so as to bring the economically most satisfactory devices into the service of the community, it cannot be less important from the standpoint of national economics to study scientifically the efficiency of the advertisements in order that the national means may in this industry, too, secure the greatest possible effects. It is only a secondary point that experiments of this kind are of high interest to the theoretical scientist as well. For us the advertisement is simply an instrument constructed to satisfy certain human demands by its effects on the mind. It is a question for psychology to determine the conditions under which this instrument may be best adapted to its purpose.