perfectly, by
carrying the armature in his own hand and moving it by his own
muscular strength. Tools and machines impart "form utility" to
materials. Vehicles which carry goods impart "place utility" to them
by putting them where they are more useful than they would be
elsewhere. Buildings protect goods and workers alike, and enable the
operation of transforming them to go on successfully. They also make
it possible to store goods at a time when they are not needed and take
them out for use when they are needed. In doing this, buildings help
to impart "time utility" to the merchandise that is put into them by
keeping them intact till the time comes when they will be useful.
Tools, machines, reservoirs of water, canals, roadways, buildings, and
even land itself are active capital goods, and are, for that reason,
component elements of that part of the permanent productive fund which
is known as fixed capital. They aid workers in their efforts to bring
materials into usable shapes, and this is as true of the hole in the
earth in which a savage stores provisions as it is of a fireproof
warehouse in a modern city.

_Materials which are at first Passive and later pass into the Active
State._--The hammer itself has to be made out of raw material, and,
while it is in the making, the material that enters into it is as
passive as anything else. While the ore is smelting and while the
steel is forging, the future hammer is in a preliminary stage of its
existence and is discharging a passive function. When it is completely
finished, its period of activity begins, and from this time on it
helps to manipulate other things. The materials which enter into
consumers' goods go through no such transition. The leather remains
passive till, in the form of a pair of shoes, it clothes its user's
feet; and at this point it ceases to be a capital good at all. The
steel of the hammer is first a passive good and later an active one.

_The Use of Capital Goods Universal._--There is no doubt that capital
goods are used in the most primitive industry. Implements existed in
times too remote for tracing; and even if they had not been used, raw
material would have been indispensable. People living in an economic
stage so ultraprimitive as to use no mediate goods whatever could
sustain life only by plucking wild fruit or gathering fish or other
food stuff by hand, and so long as they could do this their industry
might conceivably consist in getting c