DEMAND 
6i 
value is not conceivable as a quantity, or at 
most is barely conceivable as a quantity, 
whereas economic values are conceivable as 
quantities and are moreover measurable. 1 
It is true that the thorough-going Utilitarians 
thought of absolute, value as a quantity— 
as a simple sum of economic values viewed as 
atoms of pleasure, or whatever else they liked 
to call the feeling elements which in their 
philosophy they treated arithmetically—but 
once the atomistic view of experience is 
departed from, and economic value becomes 
merely the expression of preferential relations, 
absolute value is shifted on to a plane of its 
own where measurement may be impossible. 
For what after all are the economic values ? 
It has been laid down above that they repre 
sent no more than preferences. Now these 
preferences have their origin in our implicit 
notions of absolute value and mean no 
more than relative degrees of imagined 
conduciveness to this absolute value. And 
evidently the thing to which economic goods 
conduce cannot be measured against the 
means by which it is brought about, if these 
1 My colleague, Professor Unwin, suggested to me 
the significance of this point, particularly in relation- 
to the seeming conflict between economic and idealistic 
points of view,