And, then, is not this line of demarcation, which you attempt to draw between the two descriptions of utility, chimerical, arbitrary, and impossible? How can you thus disjoin the co-operation of nature and that of man when they combine and get mixed up everywhere, much more when the one tends constantly to replace the other, which is precisely what constitutes progress? If economical science, so dry in some respects, in other aspects elevates and fascinates the mind, it is just because it describes the laws of this association between man and nature,—it is because it shows gratuitous utility substituting itself more and more for onerous utility, enjoyments bearing a greater and greater proportion to labour and fatigue, obstacles constantly lessening, and, along with them, value; the perpetual mistakes and miscalculations of producers more than compensated by the increasing prosperity of consumers; natural wealth, ‹gratuitous› and ‹common›, coming more and more to take the place of wealth which is ‹personal› and ‹appropriated›. What! are we to exclude from Political Economy what constitutes its religious Harmony? [p192] Air, light, water, are gratuitous, you say. True, and if we enjoyed them under their primitive form, without making them co-operate in any of our works, we might exclude them from Political Economy just as we exclude from it the possible and probable utility of comets. But observe the progress of man. At first he is able to make air, light, water, and other natural agents co-operate very imperfectly. His satisfactions were purchased by laborious personal efforts, they exacted a large amount of labour, and they were transferred to others as important ‹services›; in a word, they were possessed of great ‹value›. By degrees, this water, this air, this light, gravitation, elasticity, calorie, electricity, vegetable life, have abandoned this state of relative inactivity. They mingle more and more with our industry. They are substituted for human labour. They do for us gratuitously what labour does only for an onerous consideration. They annihilate value without diminishing our enjoyments. To speak in common language, what cost us a hundred francs, costs us only ten—what required ten days’ labour now demands only one. The whole value thus annihilated has passed from the domain of Property to that of Community. A considerable proportion of human efforts has been set free, and placed at our disposal for other enterprises; so that with equal labour, equal services, equal value, mankind have enlarged prodigiously the circle of their enjoyments; and yet you tell me that I must eliminate and banish from the science this utility, which is gratuitous and common, which alone explains progress, as well upward as forward, if I may so speak, as well in wealth and prosperity as in freedom and equality! We may, then, legitimately attach to the word Wealth two meanings.