Is value, then, absolute or relative? Is value or price the prior notion? Was the classical English economics superficial in its predilection for the relative conception of value? Or is the reigning Austrian economics profound in its reliance upon marginal utility? By way of answer let us ask--What in our world can be more absolute a fact than a man's transition from one level of experience and action to another? Can the flight of time be stayed or turned backward? And if not can the acts by whose intrinsic uniqueness and successiveness time becomes filled for me and by which I feel time's sensible passage as swift or slow, lose their individuality? But it is not by a mere empiric temporalism alone that the sufficient absoluteness of the present act is attested. My transition from phase to phase of "finitude" is a thing so absolute that Idealism itself has deemed an Absolute indispensable to assure its safe and sane achievement. And with all Idealism's distrust of immediate experience for every evidential use, the Idealist does not scruple to cite the "higher obviousness" of personal effort, attainment, and fruition as the best of evidence for his most momentous truth of all.[59] And accordingly (in sharp descent) we need not hesitate to regard value in exchange as a primary fact in its own right, standing in no need of resolution into marginal pseudo-absolutes. A price agreed to and paid marks a real transition to another level. There are both marginal valuation and _Werthaltung_ on this level, but they are subordinate incidents to this level's mapping and the conservation of its resources. On this level every marginal utility is relative, as we have seen, to every other through their common relation to the complex plan of organization as a whole.[60]
§ 18. In conclusion one more question closely related to the foregoing may be briefly touched upon. We have held that the individual's attitude toward a commodity is in the first instance one of putting a price-estimate upon it and only secondarily that of holding it in a provisionally settled marginal esteem. If this principle of the priority of price-estimation or exchange value is true, it seems evident that there can be no line of demarcation drawn (except for doubtfully expedient pedagogical purposes) between (1) "Subjective valuations" with which individuals are conceived to come to a market and (2) a mechanical equilibration of demand and supply which it is the distinctive and sole function of market concourse to effect. In such a view the market process in strict logic must be timeless as it is spaceless; a superposition of the two curves is effected and they are seen to cross in a common point which their shapes geometrically predetermine. Discussion, in any proper sense, can be no inherent part of a market process thus conceived. Once in the market, buyers and sellers can only declare their "subjective exchange valuations" of the commodity and await the outcome with a dispassionate certainty that whoever may gain by exchanging at the price to be determined, those who cannot exchange will at all events not lose. But considered as a typical likeness of men who have seen a thing they want and are seeking to possess it, this picture of mingled hope and resignation is not convincing. Most actual offering of goods for sale that one observes suggests less the dispassionate manner of the physiologist or psychologist taking the measure of his subject's reactions, sensibilities, and preferences than the more masterful procedure of the physician or the hypnotist who seeks to uproot or modify or reconstruct them. This is the process known in economic writing since Adam Smith as "the higgling and bargaining of the market."