uniformly accompanied by the sensation of pleasure. It will be found that certain com modities are consumed in order to preserve life or to restore health, though they confer no immediate pleasure. Others will be con sumed because they are essential to some pleasure to be obtained from a future con sumption. It may be that the commodities, first consumed, which are in rank subordinate and secondary, confer pain rather than pleas ure. In estimating the pleasure from the second commodity, the one chiefly concerned, it is necessary to make a deduction for the dis-utility of the first, before a just estimate of the entire consumption is possible.
Any commodity which is essential to life may be said to possess absolute utility. This kind of utility cannot be economically meas ured. Any commodity which is consumed only because of its absolute utility, or because its consumption is required for the sake of some other pleasure, may be said to have negative utility, or dis-utility. Commodities which are consumed for the pleasure which they confer, on the other hand, have positive utility. An article which has absolute utility may possess also positive utility, as is the case usually with food ; or it may be neutral, so that no economic account need be taken of it, as with air ; or it may have dis-utility of which, again, account must be taken as a deduction from the pleasure enjoyed from consumption. This would be true, for in stance, of torn or ill-fitting garments which we were compelled to wear in the absence of suitable clothing, or of the consumption of disagreeable medicine.' It should be pointed out that utility must often pass through several steps before it reaches the desire to which it The leather of which shoes are to be made 1 Absolute utility is the satisfaction of mere living. Positive utilities refer not to life, but to the content of life; they are the sum of satisfaction that can be added to bare living. Negative utilities are the pains that detract from the pleasure of living. A man may have the absolute utility of life, yet he may suffer all kinds of pain and be on the point of suicide. Every life con tains the absolute utility of living plus certain positive utilities or pleasures, minus certain negative utilities or pains.—Patten, Dynamic Economics, p. 40.
2 A fertilizer is useful to enrich a meadow; the meadow is useful to produce hay; hay is useful to feed horses; and horses possesses a mediate or indirect, though it is clearly a positive, utility. The desire for pro
tection for the feet cannot be met until a further act of production, the transformation of the leather into shoes, has taken place. The satis faction of the desire involves a long industrial process which is partially completed when the leather is produced. In the strict sense no util ity has yet been produced ; but for convenience in rewarding the efforts of producers the indus trial process is divided into distinct operations, and at the end of each a utility is said to have been created. A utility is attributed to the un finished product, derived from the anticipated utility of the commodity into the production of which it is to enter. It will be less than the utility of that commodity, because time must elapse and further productive effort be ex pended before its transformation is But all commodities find their ultimate goal are useful to do service. From the fertilizer to the man are several steps, but it is the final step which makes all the others count. — Gregory, Political Economy.
I Compare the distinction made in Chapter XIII. between future and present goods. From the study of consumption all consideration of future goods is excluded, since it is only present in ministering to human wants. The whole material environment is a vast aggregate of useful things, the power of which to yield posi tive utility grows steadily greater. The natural forces remain constant, but man's control over them increases with invention and social prog ress. Every new capacity for enjoyment finds existing the necessary physical conditions to provide for it. Because man's industry is not adapted to those conditions, and because the pleasures are not selected in the order indicated by the economic conditions, the possible utilities are not realized, and the pain involved in secur ing those which are realized remains dispropor tionately intense. To society as a whole the environment is capable of yielding utilities in finite in number and of infinite variety. The limitations actually experienced are to be traced to subjective causes.
The individual is restricted in his choice of utilities by the expense which he must undergo to secure them and by the amount of time at goods that can be consumed. Future goods may, of course, be " productively consumed," or they may be destroyed through waste.