Sec. 8] INCOME 105
far as it has any recognized meaning, it may perhaps be
expressed in the phrase “enjoyable commodities and serv-
tees.” This concept is certainly more adequate than
that of money-income; for it includes the supplementary
elements which we found lacking under the head of money-
income, such as the clergyman’s use of a parsonage, the
servant’s board and lodging, and the farmer’s produce for
his own consumption. It is also less superficial than the
concept of money-income; for it recognizes that money
is only an intermediary, and seeks to discover the real ele-
ments for which that money-income stands.
But the definition errs in two particulars: first, instead of
making income consist simply and consistently of one kind
of element, services, it attempts to include with this
element the totally incongruous element, commodities;
and, secondly, it unnecessarily restricts itself to enjoyable
elements; for, though enjoyable elements are, in the last
analysis, the final income of society or of an individual,
the fact that they are should constitute the end of our rea-
sonings and not the beginning. We shall now take up these
two errors in order.
That the two elements — “commodities” and “services”
— form a heterogeneous combination is evident from the
fact that one is concrete wealth and the other, abstract use
of that wealth. To bring about homogeneity we could
exclude uses altogether and confine “income” to concrete
commodities; or we could exclude commodities altogether
and restrict the term wholly to uses. The latter alter-
native, which is the solution offered in the present book,
seems never to have occurred to those who have written
on the subject. The former alternative is quite untenable
and has been instinctively discarded. Instead of either
alternative, the course which has actually been pursued has
been the eclectic makeshift of including some commodities
and the services or uses of others, and even sometimes both
the commodities and the uses of these very commodities.
