And our theory carries us even further than Professor Urban cares to go here. Naive and unreflecting experience is perfectly justified in treating these objective values as qualities of the objects themselves. To the individual man, an objective value, say the value of an economic good, _is_ as a rule, a quality almost wholly independent of his personal subjective feelings or point of view. The average man, "by taking thought," can no more affect the value of wheat or corn or other big staple than he can "add a cubit to his stature." For the great mass of men, and the great mass of commodities, this holds true. The individual finds the world of economic values a part of the brute universe, like the force of gravity, or the weather, or the law against murder--less invariable than the force of gravity, and less variable, as a rule, than the weather--to which he must adapt his individual economy. He is not wholly impotent to change this world of economic values, nor is he wholly without influence on the balance of cosmic forces. And, if possessed of enough social _power_ (which we shall find to constitute the essence of these social values) he may substantially modify the action of the law against murder, or the values of those commodities about which the rich may be capricious; or even, if intelligent in the use of his power, he may undertake a successful "bull" campaign, and force up the value of wheat or cotton. But even in such cases, he deals with objective facts,--which often, in the midst of a bull campaign, behave in a most surprising and disconcerting manner![145] The existence of external constraining and directive forces are matters of every day experience. Laws, moral values, social constraints of a thousand subtle and obvious kinds, are facts so well known that education has made it its central task to teach the individual how to adjust himself to them. They have been described and elaborated in innumerable books.[146] _That_ they exist is certain. Their origin, nature and function we shall study in what is to follow.