The common needs must have their measure of recognition, but no attempted ethical valuation of them can ever come to a result convincingly warranted to the "energetic" self by psychological conditions. The economic situation as such is in this sense (that is, from the standpoint of any recognized ethical standards) unintelligible. It is this ethical unintelligibility that often lends a genuine element of tragedy to situations which press urgently and in which the ends at issue are of great ethical moment. It is no small matter to the emigrant, for example, that he must cut the very roots by which he has grown to the sort of man he finds himself to be. His whole nature protests against this violence, and questions its necessity, though the necessity is unmistakable and it would be quite impossible for him not to act accordingly. Nevertheless, tragic as such a conflict may well be, it does not differ in any logically essential way, does not differ in its degree of strictly logical difficulty, from the ethically much less serious economic problems of our everyday life. Now, we have already defined the economic act for which economic judgment is preparatory as being, in general terms, the diversion of certain means from a present use to which they have been devoted to a new use which has come to seem in a general way desirable.[145] Thus, in the cases just mentioned, the lawyer contemplates the virtual purchase of his new career by the income which his profession might in years to come afford him, the emigrant seeks a better market for his labor, and the pleasure-seeker and the ambitious student and the buyer of a commodity in the market propose to themselves, each one, the diversion from some hitherto intended use of a sum of money. Manifestly it is immaterial from our logical point of view whether the means in question which one proposes to apply in some new way are in the nature of physical and mental strength, or materials and implements of manufacture ready to be used, or means of purchase of some sort wherewith the desired service or commodity may be obtained at once. The economic problem, to state it technically, is the problem of the _reapplicability of the means_, interpreting the category of means quite broadly. In a word, then, the method of procedure adapted to the economic type of situation is that of valuation of the means, not that of direct valuation of the ends. This method is one of valuation since, like the ethical method, it is determinative of a purpose, but it accomplishes this result in its own distinctive way. The problem of our present analysis will accordingly be how this method of valuation of the means is able to help toward an adjustment of disparate or unrelated ends which the ethical method is inadequate to effect.