In the economic situation also, as above described, there is present the requisite condition of the consciousness of objectivity. Here, as in the ethical situation, an object is presented which one must redetermine, and toward which one must presently act in a way likewise to be determined in detail in judgment. We shall defer until a later stage discussion of the reason why this subject of the economic judgment is the _means_ in the activity that is in progress. We are not yet ready to show that the means _must_ be the center of attention under the conditions which have been specified. Here we need only note the fact of common experience that economic judgment does center upon the means, and show that in this fact is given the objective status of the means in the judgment-process; for the economic problem is essentially that of withdrawing a portion, a "marginal increment," of the means from some use or set of uses to which they are at present set apart, and applying it to the new end that has come to seem, on ethical grounds at least, desirable; and we may regard this diversion as the essentially economic act which, in the agent's apprehension during judgment, is contingent upon the determination of the means. The object as economic is accordingly the means, or a marginal portion of the means, which is to be thus diverted (or, so to speak, exposed to the likelihood of such diversion), and its determination must be of such a nature as to show the economic urgency, or at least the permissibility, of this diversion. Into this determination, manifestly, the results of much auxiliary inquiry into physical properties of the means must enter--such properties, for example, as have to do with its technological fitness for its present use as compared with possible substitutes, and its adaptability for the new use proposed. Taking the word in the broad sense of _object of thought_, it is always an object in space and time to which the economic judgment assigns an economic value; and it is true here (just the same is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of the psychological and sociological determinations necessary to the fixation of ethical value) that the _economically motivated_ physical determination of the objective means from the standpoint of the emergency in hand is the full "causal" explanation of the economic act. It must, however, be carefully observed that this physical determination is in the typical case altogether incidental, from the agent's standpoint, to the assignment of an economic character or value to the means--a value which will at the close of the judgment come to conscious recognition. As we shall see, the process is directed throughout by reference to economic principles and standards, and what shall be an adequate determination in the case depends upon the precision with which these are formulated and the strenuousness with which they are applied. In a word, the economic