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 remarkable,
 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 difference
 existing between them.
The author of the Templars’ Dialogues on
Political Economy is the only writer who appears
 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, nevertheless,
 is not uniformly consistent, as will be shown in the
next chapter.