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