awaken an anti-economic desire which he would be too
weak to inhibit. The salesman must know how to use arguments and
suggestions and how to make them effective,[55] but the customer too
must know how to see through a misleading argument and how to resist
mere suggestion.

The postulate that the psychical factors in commercial life are to be
carefully regarded is repeated in more complex form in the wholesale
business and in the stock exchange. It is a perfectly justified and
consistent thought which recently led a large credit bureau to an
effort to base its information on psychological analysis. It is well
known that there are bureaus in which the ledger experiences of a
large circle of companies in the same commercial line are collected,
tabulated, and recorded, thus affording an automatic review of the
occurrences, focusing early attention on doubtful accounts and
pointing out weaknesses in the customers' conditions, as they
develop, as well as evidences of prosperity. The ledger experience
which a single company has with all its customers is tabulated without
revealing its identity to the associates, who get reports containing
it, and the many combined ledgers become a valuable guide. Yet all
such methods can show only actual movements in the market, and cannot
allow the prospects of future development to be determined, simply
because they cannot take into account the personal equations. Only an
acquaintance with the character and the temperament, the intelligence
and the habits, the energy and the weakness, of the head of a firm can
tell us whether the company, even with satisfactory resources, may go
down, or whether, even though embarrassed, it may hold out. The
psychological pioneer, therefore, aims not only toward an exchange of
ledger accounts, but toward a real psychological diagnosis and
prognosis. If a member of a firm is personally known to some scores of
business men who have had commercial dealings with him, and each one
of them, without disclosing his identity to any one but the central
bureau, sends to it a statement of personal impressions, a composite
picture of the mental physiognomy can be worked out. Of course all
this has been often done in the terms of popular psychology and in a
haphazard, amateurish way. The new plan is to arrange the questions
systematically under the point of view of scientific descriptive
psychology. Regular psychograms, in which the probability of a
particular kind of be