The modern man and the modern woman live upon the upper ranges of their qualities, and in no respect more momentously than in respect to those qualities exercised and demanded by vocational fitness. In the biological sense they are all highly specialized, refined, derivative, secondary issues of qualities that had a limited scope in the primitive form of life in which the race achieved its maturity and established its psychology. The problem of civilization is to train these original traits of man to the specific cherished purposes of the work of the world. The life of the mind is as highly artificial as the life of the cities; for such is the condition of the twentieth century. Yet the primitive man survives and asserts his own; life is not all vocation. Social and industrial complexity dominates the expressions of human psychology. To unite a comprehension of their foundations with skill in applying their demands is the business of the "applied" psychologist. The present contribution, it is hoped, will prove a helpful aid to those who are striving to understand as well as to those who must apply with what wisdom they command, the available resources of human nature. JOSEPH JASTROW. VOCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY CHAPTER I MOTIVES AND ANTECEDENTS OF VOCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY VOCATIONAL EFFORTS OF PRIMITIVE MAGIC Among very primitive people we find the recognition already established that the course of the individual's fortune depends on two distinct factors: external forces and personal characteristics. Individuals similar in type experience different fortunes because of the different external events that attend their respective careers. Equally, individuals of however diverse characteristics suffer the same fortunes at the hands of some common or identical external occurrence. Two combatants of equal skill and valor are rendered unequal by a defective lance; two runners equally swift are made unequal by a pebble in the path; a vigorous babe fails to mature properly because of pestilence, war, or famine. On the other hand, both old and young, weak and strong, stupid and cunning, are alike reduced to helplessness in the face of flood, earthquake, and forest fire. Primitive thinking, in its attempts to control the course of personal fortune, thus had its attention directed to two groups of factors, each of which it sought to control by such means as it could at the moment devise. A very early stage of such thinking took the form of the belief that _desire_ could impress itself on the course of physical events and also on the development of personal characteristics. The expression of desire, either of the individual immediately concerned or of others more remotely involved, was consequently invoked and declared in more or less emphatic and overt form as a determining factor in personal fortune. In many cases this expression was given some indirect or symbolic form, as in gesture, ritual, tableau, masquerade, and imitative portrayal.