In the value experience, as a conscious experience, and from the structural side, we may distinguish these phases: feeling, desire, and the reality-feeling, each present at least to a minimal degree. And yet it seems to me that we have in none of these, considered as phases _in consciousness_, the most essential aspect of value. For our purposes the structural aspect is not the most significant. The _functional_ aspect is of more importance. And the function of values is the function of _motivation_. That value is greatest which counts for most in motivating activity. A well-established and unquestioned value, which in a concrete situation has the _pas_ over all the others concerned, has little need to awaken the emotional intensity that other, less certain, values, whose position in the scale is as yet undetermined, may require. A girl is arranging a dinner-party. Whom shall she invite? Well, her chum of course must be there. No question arises. There is no need for conscious emotion. One or two others are settled upon almost as readily, and with as little emotional intensity. But now comes the problem _at the margin_! For eight or ten others are almost equally desirable, and there are only six places. The lower values, compared with each other, must show themselves for what they are, must come vividly into consciousness, must be felt and desired _in order that_ they may be _compared_,--not in order that they may be! From the functional side, then, the test of a value is its influence upon activity. The "common denominator," or, better, the abstract essence, of values, is, not feeling, nor desire, but power in motivation, and the expression of this is of course the activity itself. The _functional_ significance of the consciously realized desire and feeling aspects of values comes in when values are to be compared and weighed against one another, and--a phase that was stressed in a preceding section, and will again be adverted to shortly--when values are to be _shared_ consciously by different individuals, when they are to be communicated and discussed,--that is to say, are to become objects of a group consciousness.