Such a bias pervading the industrial community must greatly fortify the native bent to construe all facts of observation in anthropomorphic terms. But the training given by the petty trade of the handicraft era, on the other hand, is not altogether of this character. The itinerant merchant’s huckstering, as well as the buying and selling in which all members of the community were concerned, would doubtless throw the personal strain into the foreground and would act to keep the self-regarding sentiments alert and active and accentuate an individualistic appreciation of men and things. But the habit of rating things in terms of price has no such tendency, and the price concept gains ground throughout the period. Wherever the handicraft system reaches a fair degree of development the daily life of the community comes to centre about the market and to take on the character given by market relations. The volume of trade grows greater, and purchase and sale enter more thoroughly into the details of the work to be done and of the livelihood to be got by this work. The price system comes into the foreground. With the increase of traffic, book-keeping comes into use among the merchants; and as fast as the practice of habitual recourse to the market grows general, the uncommercial classes also become familiar with the rudimentary conceptions of book-keeping, even if they do not make much use of formal accounts in their own daily affairs.[126] The logic and concepts of accountancy are wholly impersonal and dispassionate; and whether men’s use of its logic and concepts takes the elaborate form of a set of books or the looser fashion of an habitual rating of gains, losses, income, and outgo in terms of price, its effect is unavoidably in some degree to induce a statistical habit of mind. It makes immediately for an exact quantitative apprehension of all things and relations that have a pecuniary bearing; and more remotely, by force of the pervasive effect of habituation, it makes for a greater readiness to apprehend all facts in a similarly objective and statistical fashion, in so far as the facts admit of a quantitative rating. Accountancy is the beginning of statistics, and the price concept is a type of the objective impersonal, quantitative apprehension of things. Coincidently, because they do not lend themselves to this facile rating, facts that will not admit of a quantitative statement and statistical handling decline in men’s esteem, considered as facts, and tend in some degree to lose the cogency which belongs to empirical reality. They may even come to be discounted as being of a lower order of reality, or may even be denied factual value.