ABSTRACT
To set the scene, and to gain your attention (all commentators are agreed that this is the first difficulty faced by anyone with any kind of proposition to put over), let me begin by quoting a grand evolutionary statement which culminates in the fulfilment of the characteristic twentieth-century mode of being. On the first page of a how-to book for prospective door-to-door salesmen published in 1927, there occurs the following passage which moves into realms far beyond the contingently practical:
In a commercial sense, by ‘selling’ we mean disposing of or exchanging commodities for profit.
