The effort of the Austrians, and of other schools of economic theory, to explain and justify this notion of value as an objective quantity, has already been considered, and our conclusion has been that, through a too narrow delimitation of their determinants, they have been led into circular reasoning. A further criticism is now possible, in the light of our sociological and psychological conclusions: the picking out of _any_ abstract elements, however numerous, with the effort, by a synthesis, to combine them into a concrete social quantity, must fail. In the process of abstraction we leave out vital elements of the concrete social situation; how shall we expect these vital elements left out to reappear when we put the abstract elements into a synthesis? They cannot, if the synthesis be logically made. And it is precisely because Professor Davenport is so accurate in his logic that he fails to get a social quantity out of the abstract elements of subjective utility, etc. But the majority of economists, less careful in their formal logic, but more impressed by the facts of social life and by the exigencies of getting a working set of concepts, have assumed and used the quantitative concept, with satisfactory results so far as practical problems are concerned, but without fundamental theoretical consistency. The elements which the abstract theories suppress persist, under the guise of economic value itself, in the facts of life, and take their vengeance on the theory by forcing it into a circle. Our problem, then, is not to find out certain elements out of which to construct social value by a synthesis. The proper procedure will be the reverse of that: to take social value as we find it--i.e., as it _functions_ in economic life,--and then to analyze it, picking out certain prominent and significant phases, or moments, in it, which, taken abstractly, are not the whole story, but which furnish the criteria of social value, and control over which is significant for the purpose of controlling social values. In subsequent chapters, we shall, carrying out this plan, try to put concrete meaning into our abstract formulation of the problem. FOOTNOTES: [144] _Op. cit._, p. 17. [145] _Cf._ Royce, J., _The World and the Individual_, New York, 1901, vol. I, pp. 209-10, and 225. [146] I may refer here particularly to Durkheim, _De la division du travail social_, Paris, 1893. In giving this reference, of course, I do not commit myself to the "mediaeval realism" of which Durkheim has been, perhaps justly, accused. _Cf._, also, Professor Ross's admirable _Social Control_. [147] _Cf._ Ely, _Outlines of Economics_, 1908 ed., pp. 99-100, and Tarde, _Psychologie Economique_, vol. I, p. 85, n. See _supra_, chap. II. [148] _Cf._ Wieser, _Natural Value_, pp. 65, 162-63, 210-12, and 36; Flux, _Economic Principles_, chap. II. [149] _Quintessence of Socialism_, London, 1898, pp. 55-59, 91 _et seq._, 123-24.