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ple and remained good for use, even after his death. The produced commodities were composed of raw material, freely supplied by nature, combined with some mental work which gave him the conception of how to make and to use the object, and some work on his part which finally shaped the thing; all of this mental and manual work consumed an amount of time. It is obvious that all of these elements are indispensable to produce anything of any value, or of any use-value. His child not only directly received some of the use-values produced by him, but was initiated into all of his experiences and observations. (As we know, power, as defined in mechanics, means the ratio of work done to the time used in doing it.) All those things are time-binding phenomena produced by the time-binding capacity of man; but man has _not_ known that _this capacity_ was his _defining mark_. We must notice the strange fact that, from the engineering point of view, humanity, though very developed in some ways, is childishly undeveloped in others. Humanity has some conceptions about dimensions and talks of the world in which we live as having three dimensions; yet even in its wildest imagination it can not picture tangibly a _fourth_ dimension; nay, humanity has not learned to grasp the real meanings of things that are basic or fundamental. All of our conceptions are relative and comparative; all of them are based upon matters which we do not yet understand; for example, we talk of time, space, electricity, gravity, and so on, but no one has been able to define them in terms of the data of sensation; nevertheless--and it is a fact of the greatest importance--we learn how to use many things which we do not fully understand and are not yet able to define. In political economy the meagreness of our understanding is especially remarkable; we have not yet grasped the obvious fact--a fact of immeasurable import for all of the social sciences--that with little exception the wealth and capital possessed by a given generation are not produced by its own toil but are the inherited fruit of dead men's toil--a free gift of the past. We have yet to learn and apply the lesson that not only our material wealth and capital but our science and art and learning and wisdom--all that goes to constitute our civilization--were produced, not by our own labor, but by the time-binding energies of past generations. Primitive man used natural laws without knowing them o
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