The following of Labriola's assertions is not original, but is nevertheless quite gratuitous: 'Pure economics is so little extra-historical, that it has borrowed the data from real history, of which it makes two absolute postulates: the freedom of labour and the freedom of competition, pushed to their extreme by hypothesis.' If I open Pantaleoni's well-known treatise, I read in the very first paragraph of the _Teoria del valore_, Ferrara's fundamental theory that: 'value is above all a phenomenon of the _economics of the individual or isolated person_.' So little do the legal conditions of society enter into the necessary postulates of pure economics. After which, Labriola ought not to be horrified if I have written: 'that Marx has taken his celebrated equivalence[77] "between value and labour from outside the field of pure economics." He will ask me: from whence then has he taken it? And I reply: _from a special and definite type of society_, in which the legal organisation and the pre-supposed conditions of fact make value correspond to the quantity of labour. Labriola does not consider justified the comparison which I have drawn, (metaphor for metaphor), between the commodities which in Marxian economics are presented as the _crystallisations of labour_ and the goods which in pure economics might well be called _quantities of possible satisfactions for crystallised wants_. 'Hitherto--he exclaims--only sorcerers have been able to believe, or to cause it to be believed, that by desires alone a part of ourselves might be glutinised into any goods whatsoever.' But what does _glutinise_ mean? To obtain the commodity _a_ costs us _x_ labour of a given kind, this is Marx's _congealed labour_. Pure economics, using a more general formula, states that it costs us that body of wants which we must leave unsatisfied: this is the form of _congealment_ which pure economics might supply. There is no question, in the one case, of an objective reality, as Labriola seems to think, or in the other of an imagined sorcery; but in both cases it is a matter of the literary use of imaginative expressions to denote mental attitudes and elaborations. In this connection Labriola, as if to limit their range, says that Marx, as an author, belonged to the seventeenth century. May I be allowed, as a humble student of literature, and the author of several investigations into the character and origin of seventeenth century style,[78] to protest. Seventeenth century style consists in ingenuity, _i.e._ in putting cold intellectuality into an æsthetic form; hence the forced comparison, the lengthy metaphor, the play on words and the equivocations. But Marx, on the contrary, misuses poetic expressions, which give the content of his thought with unrestrained vigour. We find in him just the opposite of seventeenth century style: not a lack of connection between the form and the thought, but such a violent embrace of the former by the latter that the unlucky form