A MEASURE AND A CAUSE OF VALUE. 171
occupied with investigating the measures and
causes of value. It would seem, on a first
view, that the ideas of measuring and causing
value were sufficiently distinct to escape all
danger of being confounded ; yet it is remark-
able, that both the ideas themselves, and the
terms by which they are expressed, have been
mixed and interchanged and substituted, with
an apparently total unconsciousness of any dif-
ference existing between them.

The author of the Templars’ Dialogues on
Political Economy is the only writer who ap-
pears to me to have been fully aware of this
confusion of two separate and distinct ideas™.
He traces it partly to an ambiguity in the word
determine. “ The word determine,” says he,
“ may be taken subjectively for what determines
x in relation to our knowledge, or objectively,
for what determines x in relation to itself.
* This was written before I had seen the second edition
of Mr. MilPs Elements, in which the distinction is for the
first time introduced. His language on this point, never-
theless, is not uniformly consistent, as will be shown in the
next chapter.