Inasmuch as all things in the world have been made with a certain order, in like manner they must be managed,” wrote the merchant Benedetto de Cotrugli in the fifteenth century. Order was particularly necessary in matters “of the greatest importance, such as the business of merchants, which … is ordered for the preservation of the human race.”

It is to be expected that merchants, who were herding the West into capitalism, patronizing practitioners of costruzione legittima, and marrying into the aristocracy, would think that in rationalizing their affairs they were doing humanity a favor. They may have been right, not perhaps exactly as they thought, but insofar as they were teaching humanity how to be businesslike.

The dictionary defines businesslike as efficient, concise, direct, systematic, and thorough. Nothing about courageous or elegant or pious, terms the noble and priestly classes might claim for themselves. Businesslike means careful and meticulous and, in practice, is a matter of numbers. It was one of the trails that led to science and technology insofar as its practitioners were quantitative in their perception and manipulation of as much of experience as could be described in terms of quanta.