288 The Psychology of the Business Man 



tations of the almost universal army of debtors. Thuik what 

 an insignificant amount of business could be conducted if our 

 credit civilization suddenly returned to the primitive cash or 

 barter basis of exchange by eliminating the enormous and com- 

 plicated business machinery built up on the reasoned-out ex- 

 pectations of future human actions from their past actions and 

 character ! 



As to the two kinds of reasoning, induction and deduction, 

 my observation and conviction is that the overwhelming part 

 of the business man's, as well as all persons, serious, honest 

 and useful reasoning is the carrying over from a mor<: or less 

 experienced association the belief that, when one member of 

 the association again occurs, the other or a similar member 

 has preceded or will follow. With the more or less conscious 

 testing of this casual relation by the four casual tests of the 

 methods of agreement, difference, concomitant variations and 

 residues this makes up reasoning by induction, or from partic- 

 ular cases to a new case. 



The little use that is made of deduction, or the referring 

 a new case to a universal rule for its. casual explanation, see:. is 

 to me chiefly in cases of illusion or imposition. Thus, the 

 house-seeker in one of the above examples, was misled by his 

 expectation that if some of the house was cared for ail the 

 house would be. The short-cut way of disposing of a foe or 

 competitor by referring him to the Jews, Catholics or Demo- 

 crats, as though they formed a universal sure premise of bad 

 people, is, alas, very common. The implied reasoning in 'Mt 

 must be good if it comes from Brown's" is the suspicious major 

 premise that ''All Brown's things are good." The promising 

 cheapness because of a "Fire Sale" or'a "Remnant Sale ;" relia- 

 ble quality because of staid associations with the name Ply- 

 mouth, New England, or Quaker, or style because from the^ 

 Palace, Regal, or Imperial is the same sort of specious deduc- 

 tive reasoning with which a facetious passenger accosted the 

 seated motorman of a powerless car, — "Why. don't you go on r 

 You're my friend, aren't you?" 



On turning from the intellectual life of the business man- 

 to observe his emotional life or his pleasures and pains in the 

 wide sense, — tho of course this is an artificial separation of 

 what are actually intermingled, — the most striking characteris- 

 tic is his pleasure in activity. While we all inherit, evolu- 



