The Psychology of the Business Alan 



fessional man with his over-developed and largely dis- 

 torted intellectual development. His intellectual orig- 

 inality seems chiefly confined to methods of his own 

 business, as they are improved thru largely subcon- 

 scious inductive reasoning, what little deductive reason- 

 ing is used being largely for deception and imposition ; 

 while the greater part of his own business and most of 

 his ideas outside his own business are gotten thru im- 

 itation. 



His executive ability in carrying out his ideas places him 

 away above all other men in the strength of his ideo- 

 motor life of action. The working man's activity is 

 more exclusively muscular, stimulated by bodily neces- 

 sities or by example, i. e., is more sensory-motor activ- 

 ity ; while the professional man's ideo-motor tictivity is 

 largely stunted or works itself out more indirectly thru 

 w^ords. But the business man forms the middle class 

 between these two extremes, primarily because of his 

 strong and absorbing activity in doing things. 



His emotional life chiefly centers in the pleasures of activ- 

 ity and success, which tend to be developed in his busi- 

 ness to a morbidly absorbing passion of beating in a 

 fight. His pleasure in established habit and custom 

 makes him fundamentally conservative, which conflicts 

 with the opposite pleasure of novelty only in the ven- 

 turesome reasoned-out innovations or speculations of 

 his business and in the restless chasing after any new 

 excitement outside of business hours ; for, as he has lit- 

 tle permanent interest or pleasure in anything outside 

 his business, his extra-business life is the childish or 

 dissipating pleasures in the distractions of novelty. His 

 living in the eyes of others and on credit make him a 

 slave to a wearing tension of fashion and extravagance. 

 As he lacks in sympathy and trust in others, so he de- 

 cidedly excels all other men in an almost unconquerable 

 optimism and a cheery good nature. 



In all his emotional life, then, the business man differs 

 from the working man chiefly in a stronger intensity 

 rather than a larger range of emotions, just as, on the 

 other hand, he is inferior to the professional man in his 

 wider variety of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. 



