Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III MENTAL EFFICIENCY Fatigue is one of the commonest signs of inefficiency. Tired mother, tired father, tired teacher, tired preacher, tired clerk, tired president, tired servant, tired master tired not only in the evening, but often all day; tired, not from excessive work, but usually from wrong methods and habits of work; not always a healthy fatigue after a day’s normal work, but a chronic weakness, languor, living at the tips of one’s nerves. Too often the home, the school, the workshop, the office, the social gathering, and the government are in the hands of tired people showing all the signs of nervous fatigue and the resulting irritability. With nervous strain comes nervous instability, and from this many sorts of vicious circles develop. Psychology has no panacea to offer for this condition of mankind; but knowledge of some of the laws of mental work and rest may do much to improve the situation. It is one of the characteristicsof mental economy that efficiency and ease seem to go together. This was illustrated in the preceding chapter, which was devoted to a single intensive example of mental economy in a specific mental process memory. To illustrate this fact further I shall present a few cases in which the recognition of certain mental laws would result in the escape from a part of this fatigue-tendency through habits of work and rest, and at the same time increase both efficiency and ease. These isolated cases are chosen to indicate some of the manifold bearings of psychology upon the conservation of mental energy. The six brief sketches illustrate the following principles respectively: (i) That sense-training is the fundamental step in the conservation of mental effort through education; (2) that education should be based upon the natural growth fr…
