But, in the next place, if value is simply so much labour, it would seem to follow, on the one hand, that nothing could have value which cost no labour, and, on the other, that nothing could be devoid of value which cost labour. Marx's method of dealing with these two objections deserves close attention, because it is here that the fundamental fallacy of his argument is brought most clearly out. He answers the first of them by drawing a distinction between _value_ and _price_, which he and his followers count of the highest consequence. Things which cost no labour may have a _price_, but they have no _value_, and, as we have seen, he mentions among such things conscience and virgin soil. No labour has touched those things; they have no immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour; they have not, and cannot have, any value, as Marx understands value. But then, he says, they command a price. Virgin soil is actually sold in the market; it may procure things that have value though it has none itself. Now, this distinction between value and price has no bearing on the matter at all, for the simple reason that, as Marx himself admits, price is only a particular form of value. Price, he says, is "the money form of value"; it is value expressed in money; it is the exchange value of a commodity for money. To say that uncultivated land may have a price but not a value is, on Marx's own showing, to say that it has an exchange value which can be definitely measured in money, and has yet no value. But he has started from the phenomena of exchange; he has told us that exchange value is the only form in which we experience value now; and he thus arrives at a theory of value which will not explain the facts. If he argued that a thing had value, but no exchange value, his position might be false, but he says that a thing may have exchange value but no value, and so his position is contradictory. Moreover, he describes money accurately enough as a measure of value, and says that it could not serve this function except it were itself valuable, _i.e._, unless it possessed the quality that makes all objects commensurable, the quality of being a product of labour. Yet here we find him admitting that virgin soil, which, _ex hypothesi_, does not possess that quality, and ought therefore to be incommensurable with anything that possesses it, is yet measured with money every day. Such are some of the absurdities to which Marx is reduced by refusing to admit that utility can confer value independently of labour.