At any rate the result of the individualistic treatment of pecuniary value has been to saddle the whole institution—the market—upon human nature. Commercialism as we find it had to be explained, and as there was nothing else available poor human nature had to bear it. The simple formula, “The people want it, and the law of supply and demand does the rest,” will explain anything. But if we allow ourselves to ask why the people want it, or just who the people are that want it, or why they can make their wants effective, we discover that we have everything to learn. The accepted economic treatment would seem to be equivalent to a renunciation of any attempt to understand the relation of value to society at large; or, in other words, of any attempt to understand value itself, since to understand a thing is to perceive its more important relations. I do not deny that the method of analysis in question has its very important uses, but if it is allowed to be the only method it becomes the source of the gravest errors. Just what does it mean, from the individual’s standpoint, when we say that the market, as a historical institution, is a main factor in values? Not merely that pre-existing individual estimates are summed up and equilibrated in accordance with the formulas of economic science, though this is one phase of the matter, but also that the individual estimates themselves are moulded by the market, at first in a general way and then, in the process of price-making, drawn toward a somewhat mechanical uniformity. The individual and the system act and react upon each other until, in most cases, they agree, somewhat as in fashion, in religious belief, and the like. The influence of the market is not secondary either in time or importance to that of the person; it is a continuous institution in which the individual lives and which is ever forming his ideas. The actual transactions are potent suggestions for new ones, and the actual transactions are the latest expressions of an institutional development in which class rule and a confused and one-sided commercialism have been chief factors. Thus the institution largely dictates the valuations which it afterward equilibrates.