Now, on the theory above explained, we have to show that the causal connection runs the other way, from Product to Cost. Human want, as was shown, is the very first consideration in the Theory of Value. The relation of each man’s resources to his varied wants determines what is the last want satisfied in each class of want, and so the Marginal Utility and subjective value of goods. The figures which buyers and sellers respectively put on their goods determine the competitors, determine the marginal pair or the last buyer, and so determine price. Through price, the subjective valuations are carried back to means of production. As the typical labourer, the peasant, measures the value of his labour by the produce he raises, or the value of his implements by the additional crop they procure, so is all value reflected back from goods to that which makes them. Thus value comes, not from the past of goods but from their future; that is to say, from the side of consumption in satisfying want. Goods stand midway between production and consumption. In the old reading it was the former term that gave value: in the new, it is the latter. Before going further, it is necessary more exactly to define the connection between production and consumption goods. All goods find their goal in satisfying the want of man. As Roscher finely says, _Ausgangspunkt, wie Zielpunkt unserer Wissenschaft ist der Mensch_. The consumption-good then—the good which is to find its destiny, and its life-work, in ministering to human want—is that for which and towards which we set in motion the whole machinery of industry. From the soil or the mine downward, every productive instrument is, economically, a consumption-good _in the making_. This Menger has put in terms which are now classical. He calls consumption goods, goods of the first or lowest rank. The goods which co-operate in immediately producing these—the group of productive instruments used in the last stage of production—he calls goods of second rank. The factors of this second group, again, are goods of third rank, and so on. Thus, if a loaf is the consumption-good or the good of first rank, the flour, the oven, and the baker’s labour form the group of second rank; the wheat, the mill, the labour, and the material that makes the oven, the group of third rank; the land, the agricultural implements, the materials of the mill, etc., the group of fourth rank, and so on. Now, as we have seen, consumption goods receive their value from the dependence of some want upon them—from their being the condition of some satisfaction. Take, then, the good, a loaf of bread. The value of the loaf in the baker’s shop is determined subjectively by its marginal utility to the consumers, and the valuations (based on this marginal utility) of buyers and sellers decide the market price at which the bread is put on the market. Looking back now at the continuity of production and consumption goods, we see that the last