CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 317
of what may be called the mechanics of consumption. Whereas those business men whose business is more immediately concerned with industry commonly have aome knowledge and take some thought of the proceases of industry ; to some appreciable extent they habitually think in mechanical terms. Their cogitations may habitually run to pecuniary conclusions, and the test to which the force and validity of their reasoning is brought may habitually be the pecuniary outcome; the beginning and end of their more serious thinking is of a pecuniary kind, but it always takes in some general features of the mechanical process along the way. Their exemption from mechanical thinking, from thinking in terms of cause and effect, is, therefore, materially qualified. But after all qualifications have been made, the fact still is apparent that the everyday life of those classes which are engaged in business differs materially in the respect cited from the life of the classes engaged in industry proper. There is an appreciable and widening difference between the habits of life of the two classes ; and this carries with it a widening difference in the discipline to which the two classes are subjected- It induces a difference in the habits of thought and the habitual grounds and methods of reasoning resorted to by each class. There results a difference in the point of view, in the facts dwelt upon, in the methods
of argument, in the grounds o£ validity appealed to; and this difference gains in magnitude and consistency as the differentiation of occupations Igoee on. So that the two classes come to have an increasing difficulty in understanding one another land appreciating one another's convictions, ideals, I capacities, and shortcomings.