But, in constituted value, all these properties acquire a
broader, more regular, truer significance than before. Thus,
utility is no longer that inert capacity, so to speak, which
things possess of serving for our enjoyments and in our
researches; venality is no longer the exaggeration of a blind
fancy or an unprincipled opinion; finally, variability has ceased
to explain itself by a disingenuous discussion between supply and
demand: all that has disappeared to give place to a positive,
normal, and, under all possible circumstances, determinable idea.
By the constitution of values each product, if it is allowable to
establish such an analogy, becomes like the nourishment which,
discovered by the alimentary instinct, then prepared by the
digestive organs, enters into the general circulation, where it
is converted, according to certain proportions, into flesh, bone,
liquid, etc., and gives to the body life, strength, and beauty.
Now, what change does the idea of value undergo when we rise from
the contradictory notions of useful value and exchangeable value
to that of constituted value or absolute value? There is, so to
speak, a joining together, a reciprocal penetration, in which the
two elementary concepts, grasping each other like the hooked
atoms of Epicurus, absorb one another and disappear, leaving in
their place a compound possessed, but in a superior degree, of
all their positive properties, and divested of all their negative
properties.
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