aphic stones.

But he would not venture, without reserve, to make such an answer, if
the example be taken in horses, instead of pictures. The most dull
economist would perceive, and admit, that a gentleman who had a fine
stud of horses was absolutely richer than one who had only ill-bred and
broken-winded ones. He would instinctively feel, though his
pseudo-science had never taught him, that the price paid for the
animals, in either case, did not alter the fact of their worth: that the
good horse, though it might have been bought by chance for a few
guineas, was not therefore less valuable, nor the owner of the galled
jade any the richer, because he had given a hundred for it.

So that the economist, in saying that his science takes no account of
the qualities of pictures, merely signifies that he cannot conceive of
any quality of essential badness or goodness existing in pictures; and
that he is incapable of investigating the laws of wealth in such
articles. Which is the fact. But, being incapable of defining intrinsic
value in pictures, it follows that he must be equally helpless to define
the nature of intrinsic value in painted glass, or in painted pottery,
or in patterned stuffs, or in any other national produce requiring true
human ingenuity. Nay, though capable of conceiving the idea of intrinsic
value with respect to beasts of burden, no economist has endeavoured to
state the general principles of National Economy, even with regard to
the horse or the ass. And, in fine, _the modern political economists
have been, without exception, incapable of apprehending the nature of
intrinsic value at all_.

And the first specialty of the following treatise consists in its giving
at the outset, and maintaining as the foundation of all subsequent
reasoning, a definition of Intrinsic Value, and Intrinsic
Contrary-of-Value; the negative power having been left by former writers
entirely out of account, and the positive power left entirely undefined.

But, secondly: the modern economist, ignoring intrinsic value, and
accepting the popular estimate of things as the only ground of his
science, has imagined himself to have ascertained the constant laws
regulating the relation of this popular demand to its supply; or, at
least, to have proved that demand and supply were connected by heavenly
balance, over which human foresight had no power. I chanced, by singular
coincidence, lately to see this theory of the law of demand and sup