l departing from the type of substitution pure and simple, the
commodities sacrificed will come to have a certain "value in exchange"
that clearly is a new fact, a new judgment, in experience. This value in
exchange, this "subjective" or "personal" exchange value, may fittingly
be termed a "value for transition." The transition once made, the
exchange once concluded, I shall deem the motor-car, for example, that I
have _not_ bought to replace one used-up, to be worth less than the
piano I _have_ bought instead. This indeed (in no disparaging sense) is
a tautology. But does this lesser relative value equal or exceed or fall
short of the value the car would have had if no question of a piano had
been raised at all and I had bought it in replacement of the old one as
a matter of course? How can one say? The question seems unmeaning, for
the levels of value referred to are different and discontinuous and the
magnitudes belong to different orders. In a word, because a "value for
transition" marks a resolve and succinctly describes an act, it cannot
be broken in two and expressed as an equating of two magnitudes
independently definable apart from the relation. The motor-car _had_ its
value as a member of the old system--the piano _has_ its value as a
member of the new. "The piano is worth more than the car"; "the car is
worth less than the piano"--these are the prospective and retrospective
views across a gulf that separates two "specious presents," not
judgments of static inequality in terms of a common measure.

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