Impostors succeed in propagating a false belief. They represent themselves as the ambassadors of Heaven. They open at pleasure the gates of heaven or of hell. When this belief has once taken firm root, “Here,” say they, “are some little images to which we have communicated the virtue of securing eternal happiness to those who carry them about their persons. In bestowing upon you one of these images, we render you an immense ‹service›. You must render us, then, certain ‹services› in return.” Here you have a ‹Value› created. It is founded on a false appreciation, you say, and that is true. We might say as much of many material things [p150] which possess a certain value, for they would find purchasers if set up to auction. Economic science would become impossible if we admitted as values only values correctly and judiciously appreciated. At every step we must begin a new course of the moral and physical sciences. In a state of isolation, depraved desires and a warped intelligence may cause a man to pursue with great effort and exertion a chimerical satisfaction—a delusion. In like manner, in the social state, it sometimes happens, as the philosopher says, that we buy regret too dear. But if truth is naturally more in keeping with the human mind than error, all these frauds are destined to disappear—all these delusive services to be spurned and lose their ‹value›. Civilisation will, in the long-run, put everybody and everything in the right place.
But we must conclude this analysis, which has already extended to too great a length. Among the various wants of our nature, respiration, hunger, thirst—and the wants and desires which take their rise in our vanity, in our heads, hearts, and opinions, in our hopes for the future, whether well or ill grounded—everywhere we have sought for Value—and we have found it wherever an ‹exchange of service› takes place. We have found it everywhere of the same nature, based upon a principle clear, simple, absolute, although influenced by a multitude of varying circumstances. We might have passed in review all our other wants; we might have cited the carpenter, the mason, the manufacturer, the tailor, the physician, the officer of justice, the lawyer, the merchant, the painter, the judge, the president of the republic, and we should have found exactly the same thing. Frequently a material substance; sometimes forces furnished ‹gratuitously› by nature; always human services interchanged, measuring each other, estimating, appreciating, ‹valuing› one another, and exhibiting simply the result of that Valuation—or «Value».