Excerpt from Problems in the Principles of Accounting

This would not be true if the aim in teaching accounting were to teach specific facts about business, or specific methods of procedure for certain kinds of circumstance. No one can ever understand accounting by learning how specifically to do specific things. The conditions and the happenings and the modifying circumstances of modern business are so multitudinous that no lifetime is long enough for one to learn by rule what should be done in every kind of case. Accounting is nothing but sublimated common sense applied to interpreting the facts of business. The requisite for accounting is simply intellectual vision with the ability to express the truth intelligibly. Such vision and such power of expression are best cultivated by practice in handling not merely the usual and stable (certainly not merely because they are usual and stable), but rather the peculiar and the unique, for these force the student to work out for himself methods and processes that may be capable of numerous applications in circumstances which, though on their faces they are wholly unlike, are in essence of the same sort.

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