Accepting, again, Mr. Clark's general postulates--the postulates of current hedonistic economics--and applying the fundamental concepts, instead of their corollaries, to his scheme of final productivity, it can be shown to fail on grounds even more tenuous and hedonistically more fundamental than those already passed in review. In all final-utility (marginal-utility) theory it is of the essence of the scheme of things that successive increments of a "good" have progressively less than proportionate utility. In fact, the coefficient of decrease of utility is greater than the coefficient of increase of the stock of goods. The solitary "first loaf" is exorbitantly useful. As more loaves are successively added to the stock, the utility of each grows small by degrees and incontinently less, until, in the end, the state of the "marginal" or "final" loaf is, in respect of utility, shameful to relate. So, with a change of phrase, it fares with successive increments of a given productive factor--labor or capital--in Mr. Clark's scheme of final productivity. And so, of course, it also fares with the utility of successive increments of product created by successively adding unit after unit to the complement of a given productive factor engaged in the case. If we attend to this matter of final productivity in consistently hedonistic terms, a curious result appears. A larger complement of the productive agent, counted by weight and tale, will, it is commonly held, create a larger output of goods, counted by weight and tale;[26] but these are not hedonistic terms and should not be allowed to cloud the argument. In the hedonistic scheme the magnitude of goods, in all the dimensions to be taken account of, is measured in terms of utility, which is a different matter from weight and tale. It is by virtue of their utility that they are "goods," not by virtue of their physical dimensions, number and the like; and utility is a matter of the production of pleasure and the prevention of pain. Hedonistically speaking, the amount of the goods, the magnitude of the output, is the quantity of utility derivable from their consumption; and the utility per unit decreases faster than the number of units increases.[27] It follows that in the typical or undifferentiated case an increase of the number of units beyond a certain critical point entails a decrease of the "total effective utility" of the supply.[28] This critical point seems ordinarily to be very near the point of departure of the curve of declining utility, perhaps it frequently coincides with the latter. On the curve of declining final utility, at any point whose tangent cuts the axis of ordinates at an angle of less than 45 degrees, an increase of the number of units entails a decrease of the "total effective utility of the supply,"[29] so that a gain in physical productivity is a loss as counted in "total effective utility." Hedonistically, therefore, the productivity in such a case diminishes, not only