Taking the word "commercial" in its broadest signification, I understand by this expression all those forms of the constructive imagination that have for their chief aim the production and distribution of wealth, all inventions making for individual or collective enrichment. Even less studied than the form preceding, this imaginative manifestation reveals as much ingenuity as any other. The human mind is largely busied in that way. There are inventors of all kinds--the great among these equal those whom general opinion ranks as highest. Here, as elsewhere, the great body invent nothing, live according to tradition, in routine and imitation. Invention in the commercial or financial field is subject to various conditions with which we are not concerned: (1) External conditions:--Geographical, political, economic, social, etc., varying according to time, place, and people. Such is its external determinism--human and social here in place of cosmic, physical, as in mechanical invention. (2) Internal, psychological conditions, most of which are foreign to the primary and essential inventive act:--on one hand, foresight, calculation, strength of reasoning;--in a word, capacity for reflection; on the other hand, assurance, recklessness, soaring into the unknown--in a word, strong capacity for action. Whence arise, if we leave out the mixed forms, two principal types--the calculating, the venturesome. In the former the rational element is first. They are cautious, calculating, selfish exploiters, with no great moral or social preoccupations. In the latter, the active and emotional element predominates. They have a broader sweep. Of this sort were the merchant-sailors of Tyre, Carthage, and Greece; the merchant-travelers of the Middle Ages, the mercantile and gain-hungry explorers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; later, in a changed form, the organizers of great companies, the inventors of monopolies, American "trusts," etc. These are the great imaginative minds. Eliminating, then, from our subject, what is not the purely imaginative element in order to study it alone, I see only two points for us to treat, if we would avoid repetition--at the initial moment of invention, the intuitive act that is its germ; during the period of development and organization, the necessary and exclusive role of schematic images. I