And this evidently applies to every form of composition embodying some unity of design or purpose, whether the treatment of a subject in pictorial or dramatic art, the making of a new dish, the construction of a machine, the arrangement of a business, or the laying out of a garden or a fortune.
So far as an economical use is made of materials or means of any kind for the attainment of any end this marginal equivalence is implied.The scientific analysis of any composite arrangement, mechanical, organic, conscious, involves this marginal assumption.It is an axiom of all 'economy' whatsoever.
But it explains nothing.Nay, in dealing with any organic being on any plane of action, it darkens counsel.It does so in several ways.First by assuming or asserting that the human mind can and does get rid of qualitative differences by referring them to a quantitative standard: secondly, by assuming or asserting that organic unity can be broken up into its constituent parts and explained in terms of these measured parts; thirdly, by assuming or asserting a uniformity of nature which conflicts with the 'novelties'
in which creative energy expresses itself.All these fallacies are just as much involved in the attempt to explain the expenditure of an income as a purely quantitative problem, as in the attempt to explain the art-value of a picture in terms of the respective quantities of line and colour.
In each case the root fallacy is the same, the illicit substitution of the abstract 'quantity' for the actual stuff, which is always qualitative and is never identical in any two cases, or at any two times.
§7.In laying out my income, I do not in fact compare all my several needs or tastes, and having assigned so much utility or desirability to each, plan my expenditure so as to spend on each just as much as it is worth, equalising all expenditure at the margins so as to maximise the aggregate.Even Benjamin Franklin or Samuel Smiles would not really do this, though they might think they did, and perhaps draw up schedules to enforce the notion.So far as I act like a free, rational being, not a creature of blind custom or routine, I employ all my personal resources of knowledge, taste, affection, energy, time, and command of material resources, in trying to realise my ideal of a good or desirable life.In the execution of this design, however it be regarded, self-realisation or career, I utilise my various resources in a manner strictly analogous to that in which the artist employs the materials and instruments of his art.Upon the canvas of time I paint myself, using all the means at my disposal to realise my ideal.Among these means is my money income.Its expenditure goes into the execution of my design.So far as I am justified in separating my expenditure of money from the expenditure of my time and other resources, and in regarding the design as an 'economic picture,' I can readily perceive that the unity of my artistic purpose involves and determines the expenditure of my income in definite proportions upon the various objects whose 'consumption' contributes to the design.But these proportions are not determined by a calculation of the separate values of the various items.For, strictly speaking, they have no separate value, any more than have the lines or colours in a picture.
Only by consideration of what we may term indifferently the artistic or organic purpose of the whole can a true appreciation or valuation be attained.
The full absurdity of suggesting that anything is learned, either in the way of valuation or of guidance, by the quantitative analysis, or the wonderful discovery of equivalence of value at the margins, will now be apparent.
This mathematical analysis can do no more towards explaining the expenditure of income than explaining the expenditure of paint.Of course, the expenditure at the margins appears to produce an equal utility: that truth is obviously contained in the very logic of the quantitative analysis.But that quantitative analysis, necessarily ignoring, as it does, the qualitative character which the organic unity of the whole confers upon its parts, fails to perform the psychological interpretation claimed for it.
So far as it is true that the last sovereign of my expenditure in bread equals in utility the last sovereign of my expenditure in books, that fact proceeds not from a comparison, conscious or unconscious, of these separate items at this margin, but from the parts assigned respectively to bread and books in the organic plan of my life.Quantitative analysis, inherently incapable of comprehending qualitative unity or qualitative differences, can only pretend to reduce the latter to quantitative differences.What it actually does is to ignore alike the unity of the whole and the qualitativeness of the parts.
