OCCUPATIONAL TYPES 325
tivate mental alertness and discrimination. A relentless process of economic selection is ever going on.
In the second place, it is equally true that the typical busi ness man s intellectual life is quite limited in range. His intellectual views and habits are formed for the most part in first-hand dealings with men and things. Too often he is educated in business and by business only. To be sure, an increasing number of business men are college bred; even the university man is not so much a rara avis among them as he used to be. And so a larger proportion of men of this class have been brought into some acquaintance with the wider ranges of intellectual life than was ever the case before. But even they usually succumb to the mental habits developed by " the street " ; settle down to the dis tinctive point of view of business, and lose all lively interest in the intellectual problems not directly involved in the ur gencies of their daily lives. That tendency is quite natural, just as it is with men in every other walk of life; and yet it is probable that in most lines of business the pressure is so high, the possibilities of failure so numerous, and the ma terial rewards of success so alluring to average human na ture, that his work monopolizes the energies of the business man to an exceptional degree, and thus sets very definite limits to his intellectual outlook, while stimulating power fully his intellectual processes within those limits. For this reason the mental processes and habits of his occu pation become more deeply stamped in, and the point of view of his occupation more fixed than is the case with most other men.
In the third place, the business man is little given to theorizing. He is absorbed in dealing with living persons, concrete things, actual situations that are constantly chang ing. Perforce he must cultivate the opportunist habit of mind. From one day s end to another he is engaged in measuring the strength and direction of the more obvious and objective forces that are playing about him, and has little time for inquiring into their ultimate origin, history and
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