566 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 
In the second place, when taken off the wrong track we shall be able to 
find the right one, and shall understand that the proper field of economic 
study is, in the first instance, the type of relationship into which men 
spontaneously enter, when they find that they can best further their own 
purposes by approaching them indirectly. There is seldom a direct line by 
which a man can make his faculties and his specialised possessions minister 
continuously to all his purposes, or even to the greater part or the most 
importunate part of them. He must find someone else to whose purposes he 
can directly devote his powers or lend his resources in order that he may 
generalise his specific capacity or possession, and then again specialise this 
generalised command in the direction his tastes or needs dictate. The industrial 
world is a spontaneous organisation for transmuting what every man has into 
what he desires, wholly irrespective of what his desires may be. 
And, in the third place, this truer conception of the economic field of investi- 
gation, coupled with the sense of the unity of fundamental law and fundamental 
motive that sway our economic and our non-economic action, will throw a 
constantly increasing emphasis upon the fact that our economic life is not and 
cannot be isolated, but is at every point combined with the direct expression 
of character and indulgence of taste, while the human relations into which it 
brings us are constantly waking in us a direct interest (whether of attraction or 
repulsion) in those purposes of others which we are directly furthering as an 
indirect means of furthering our own, purposes which we have indeed adopted, 
but beyond which we look whenever we reflect. There is no reason why means 
should not, to an undefined extent, be from the beginning, or become in course 
of time, ends in themselves, while still continuing to be means; nor, alas! is 
there any guarantee that they will not be, or will not become, negative and 
repellent as ends, either through physical weariness or moral repulsion. Perhaps 
most men’s ‘ occupations’ combine both characteristics. 
Again, the realisation of the exact nature of the economic organisation as a 
machinery for combining in mutual helpfulness persons whose ends are diverse, 
will drive it home to our consciousness that one man’s want is another man’s 
opportunity, and that it may serve a man’s turn to create a want or a passion 
in another in order that he may find his opportunity in it. All along the line, 
from a certain type of ingenious advertiser to the financier (if he really exists) 
who engineers a war in order that he may arrange a war loan, we may study 
the creation of wants and passions, destructive of general welfare, for the sake 
of securing wealth to individuals. And we may realise the deeply significant 
truth that to any individual the full discharge of his industrial function—that 
is to say, the complete satisfaction or disappearance, by whatever means, of the 
want which he is there to satisfy—must be, if he contemplates it, a nightmare; 
for it would mean that he would be ‘ out of work,’ that because no one wants 
what he can give no one wants him, and neither will anyone give him what he 
wants. 
Yet again, in our industrial relations the thing we are doing is indeed an 
end, but it is someone else’s end, not ours; and, as far as the relation is really 
economic, the significance to us of what we are doing is measured not by its 
importance to the man for whom it is done, but by the degree to which it 
furthers our own ends. There can, therefore, be no presumption of any 
coincidence between the social significance of our work and the return we receive 
for it. We cannot say ‘What men most care for they will pay most for, 
therefore what is most highly paid is most cared for,’ for (sometimes to our 
positive knowledge, and generally ‘for all we know’) it is different men who 
express their eagerness for the different things we are comparing, by offering 
such-and-such prices, and those who offer little money for a thing may do so 
not because what they demand signifies so little, but because what they would 
have to give, or to forgo, for it signifies so much. They may offer little for a 
thing not because its possession matters so little, but because their possession 
of anything, including this particular thing, matters so much. 
These and other such considerations will not directly affect our exposition of 
the mechanism of the market, the central phenomenon of the industrial world, 
but they will profoundly affect the spirit in which we approach, and in which we 
conduct, our investigation of it. For we shall not only know but shall always 
