A value really such--like money, first-class
business paper, government annuities, shares in a
well-established enterprise--can neither be increased without
reason nor lost in exchange: it is governed only by the natural
law of the addition of special industries and the increase of
products. Further, such a value is not the result of a
compromise,--that is, of eclecticism, juste-milieu, or mixture;
it is the product of a complete fusion, a product entirely new
and distinct from its components, just as water, the product of
the combination of hydrogen and oxygen, is a separate body,
totally distinct from its elements.
The resolution of two antithetical ideas in a third of a superior
order is what the school calls SYNTHESIS. It alone gives the
positive and complete idea, which is obtained, as we have seen,
by the successive affirmation or negation--for both amount to the
same thing--of two diametrically opposite concepts. Whence we
deduce this corollary, of the first importance in practice as
well as in theory: wherever, in the spheres of morality, history,
or political economy, analysis has established the antinomy of an
idea, we may affirm on a priori grounds that this antinomy
conceals a higher idea, which sooner or later will make its
appearance.
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