But whatever the form in which the social energy of control and motivation manifests itself, its functional character is the same. It has its origin in, and receives its vitality from, the social will--or better is a phase of the social will--as steam power, electric power, and the energy in human muscles, are species of the same generic force.
The effort has not been made to put the whole of our argument into these obviously uncongenial terms. The mechanical analogies, often useful for particular purposes, fail to bring out the rich complexity, the organic nature, of the social processes, and, by their very simplicity, often lead to the ignoring of essential factors. For the purposes of the practical economist, however, concerned with price analysis in a situation which is so complex that he can give attention to only one set of forces, or tendencies, at a time, and where quantitative measurement is essential, it is often highly necessary to abstract from the organic complexity, to assume that other forces than those he is measuring are constant, and to put his argument into mechanical terms. My conception involves no radical revision of economic methodology in this matter. It is primarily concerned with the interpretation and validation of this methodology. To this topic I shall return in the chapters on the relation between the theory of value and the theory of prices.
[180] Professor J. R. Commons has made some interesting comments in a note ("Political Economy and Business Economy," _Quar. Jour. Econ._, Nov., 1907), as to the extent to which intangible objects have come to have economic value. The legal and psychical nature of such values is, of course, very manifest.
[181] Moral values, like economic values, in the sense in which I use the term here, are actual facts, and not mere ideals. A moral value _is_ a value, to the extent that it is an effective _power in motivation_, to the extent that the social will backs it up, and punishes with its disapproval and with the subtle penalties which social disapproval involves, infractions of the moral standard in question. I am not here passing judgment on moral values themselves in the light of any ideal standard, but simply describing the manner in which moral values function.