absolute value; and a table of values, such as was called for in
the memoir read to the Academy of Sciences, will be possible.

Let us picture wealth, then, as a mass held by a chemical force
in a permanent state of composition, in which new elements,
continually entering, combine in different proportions, but
according to a certain law: value is the proportional relation
(the measure) in which each of these elements forms a part of the
whole.

From this two things result: one, that the economists have been
wholly deluded when they have looked for the general measure of
value in wheat, specie, rent, etc., and also when, after having
demonstrated that this standard of measure was neither here nor
there, they have concluded that value has neither law nor
measure; the other, that the proportion of values may continually
vary without ceasing on that account to be subject to a law,
whose determination is precisely the solution sought.

This idea of value satisfies, as we shall see, all the
conditions: for it includes at once both the positive and fixed
element in useful value and the variable element in exchangeable
value; in the second place, it puts an end to the contradiction
which seemed an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the
determination of value; further, we shall show that value thus
understood differs entirely from a simple juxtaposition of the
two ideas of useful and exchangeable value, and that it is
endowed with new properties.

The proportionality of products is not a revelation that we