You see from this that the question raised by me, whether by _choice_ you meant _conscious_ or _unconscious_ choice, is not a _careless_ question. It is equivalent to this other one; whether the economic fact is or is not a fact of _will_. 'This does not alter the fact of the choice,' you say. But indeed it does alter it! If we speak of _conscious_ choice, we have before us a mental fact, if of _unconscious_ choice, a natural fact; and the laws of the former are not those of the latter. I welcome your discovery that economic fact is the fact of choice; but I am _forced_ to mean by _choice_, _voluntary_ choice. Otherwise we should end by talking not only of the _choices_ of a man who is _asleep_ (when he moves from side to side) but of those of _animals_, and why not? of _plants_ and why not again? of _minerals_; passing rapidly along the steep slope down which my friend Professor C. Trivero has slipped in his recently published _Teoria dei bisogni_, for which may he be forgiven![99] When I defined economic data as 'the practical activities of man, in so far as they are considered as such, independently of any moral or immoral determination,' I did not make an arbitrary judgment, which might authorise others to do likewise, in a science which does not tolerate arbitrary judgments; but I merely _distinguished_ further within the species _practical activity_, two _sub-species_ or grades: _pure_ practical activity, (economic), and _moral_ practical activity, (ethical); will that is merely economic, and moral will. There is ambiguity in your reproach that when I speak of approval or disapproval as aroused by economic activity, I am considering the matter from a _synthetic_ instead of an analytic point of view, and that approval or disapproval are _extraneous_ factors. I did not however speak (and I believed that I had explained myself clearly), of _moral_, _intellectual_ or _æsthetic_ approval or disapproval. No, I said, and I repeat, that a judgment of approval or reprobation was necessarily bound up with economic activity: but a _merely_ ECONOMIC judgment of approval or reprobation. '_By saying_ that Rhenish wine is _useful_ to me, has a _value_ for me, is _ofelimo_ to me, I mean only to say that I like it; and I do not see how this simplest of relations can be well or ill-managed.' You will forgive me if in this sentence of yours I have italicised the words _by saying_. Here is the point. Certainly the mere _saying_ does not give rise to an internal judgment of economic approval or disapproval. It will give rise to a grammatical or linguistic, _i.e._ æsthetic, approval or disapproval, according to whether the saying is clear or confused, well or ill expressed. But it is no question of _saying_: it is a question of _doing_, _i.e._ of the action willed carried out by the movement that is willed, of a _choice_ of movement. And do you think that the acquisition and consumption of a bottle of Rhenish wine involves no