In the first chapter we viewed man as both ‹active› and ‹passive›, and we saw that ‹Want› and ‹Satisfaction›, acting on ‹sensibility› alone, were in their own nature personal, peculiar, and intransmissible; that ‹Effort›, on the contrary, the connecting link between Want and Satisfaction, the ‹mean› term between the motive principle of action and the end we have in view, proceeding from our ‹activity›, our spontaneity, our will, was susceptible of conventions and of transmission. I know that, metaphysically, no one can contest this assertion, and maintain that Effort also is personal. I have no desire to enter the territory of ideology, and I hope that my view of the subject will be admitted without controversy when put in this vulgar form:—We cannot ‹feel› the wants of others—we cannot ‹feel› the satisfactions of others; but we can ‹render service› one to another. It is this transmission of efforts, this exchange of services, which forms the subject of Political Economy; and since, on the other hand, economical science is condensed and summed up in the word ‹Value›, of which it is only a lengthened explanation, it follows that the notion of value would be imperfectly, erroneously, conceived if we were to found it upon the extreme phenomena of our sensibility—namely, our ‹Wants› and ‹Satisfactions›—phenomena which are personal, intransmissible, and ‹incommensurable› as between two individuals, in place of founding it on the manifestations of our ‹activity›, upon ‹efforts›, upon reciprocal ‹services›, which are interchanged because they are susceptible of being compared, appreciated, ‹estimated›, and which are capable of being estimated precisely because they are capable of being interchanged. In the same chapter we arrived at the following formulas:— [p134] “‹Utility› (the property which certain things and certain acts have of serving us, of being useful to us) is complex,—one part we owe to the action of nature, another to the action of man.”—“With reference to a given result, the more nature has done the less remains for human action to do.”—“The co-operation of nature is essentially ‹gratuitous›—the co-operation of man, whether intellectual or muscular, exchanged or not, collective or solitary, is essentially ‹onerous›, as indeed the word ‹Effort› implies.” And as what is ‹gratuitous› cannot possess ‹value›, since the idea of ‹value› implies ‹onerous› acquisition, it follows that the notion of Value would be still erroneously conceived, if we were to extend it, in whole or in part, to the gifts or to the co-operation of nature, instead of restricting it exclusively to human co-operation. Thus, from both sides, by two different roads, we arrive at this conclusion, that ‹value› must have reference to the ‹efforts› which men make in order to obtain the ‹satisfaction› of their ‹wants›.