Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/327

 OCCUPATIONAL TYPES 309

part in the embodiment of thought ; but even this has some intellectual value and saves his work from utter mental bar renness. However, the intellectual and the mechanical parts of the process of embodying thought in material forms are becoming more and more highly specialized and differ entiated with the further application of machinery to pro duction. The designer, who is likely to be a &quot; salaried &quot; person, formulates the idea of the thing to be made, and the machine does the rest, it being only necessary to have a man watch the machine and keep it in working order which as we have seen requires no great mental activity.

(b) The labouring man deals in his work only with the material forms of reality. He handles wood, iron, earth. His machine or his tool is a material thing and shapes material things. He has no direct dealing with life in any of its forms. It is the relations and reactions of dead mat ter with which he is concerned. Mechanical forces, proc esses and results occupy him. Not the transmutation of lifeless matter into living forms, not the relations to and reactions upon one another of living things, not the watch ing and guidance of the mysterious principle of life in its growth; not the endless, various and fascinating play of ideas in the construction of arguments, in discussion, in in vention, in the building of systems of thought, in the creation of beautiful ideals none of these things is the object of his attention in his work, none of these is involved in the processes of his work. Crude matter, physical forces, mechanical processes these are the elements with and upon which he works.

Here we must emphasize a principle which psychologists have not stressed as they should. Those things are most real to a man to which he spends most of his time and energy adjusting himself. One can get a lively sense of the reality of anything only by adjusting himself to it in some way or other by working with and upon it; and those things which he spends most of his time and energy work ing with and upon will inevitably have for him an emphatic

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