t of using; clothing perishes more
slowly by use, and furniture and dwellings more slowly still.
Some things that go gradually to destruction during the
process of utilization do not perish the more rapidly because
of it. A vase, a statue, or a picture is consumed, in the
economic sense, by a person's act of looking at it and
getting pleasure from it; but this does not hasten its
deterioration except as keeping such an ornament where it can
be seen exposes it to deterioration or accident. Climbing a
hill to get a view "consumes" the hill in a true sense, and
looking from the summit over a wide stretch of picturesque
country even consumes--that is, utilizes--the landscape; and
certainly this act does not injure the thing utilized. The
general fact, however, that goods for final use are, as a
rule, injured or destroyed either by the act of consumption
or by the exposures that are incidental to it, justifies the
use of this term to express the receiving of a service from
the usable article. It is a process in which the commodity
acts on men's sensibilities and, as a general rule, exhausts
itself while so doing. It is worth remembering that this
exhaustion of the good is not the essential part of
consumption. On the man's side that consists in deriving
benefits from the good, while on the side of the good itself
it consists in conferring benefit on the man--in doing him
good and not in doing itself harm.

_The Transition of Goods from one State to Another._--The beginning of
its service in the purchaser's dining room takes the wood of the table
out of the category of producers' goods; but there is some raw
material that is never destined to emerge from that category and enter
another. Its last state of existence as a good will be that in which
it is embodied, not in an article for consumers' use, but in an active
tool. Our tree might have furnished some of its wood for a
wheelbarrow, and if so, that part of it would have been a capital good
until it ceased to be an economic good at all. If we watch it as it
grows toward its economic maturity, we see it sawed, planed, and
otherwise fashioned under the laborer's hand, and maintaining during
all this time its passive attitude, just as does the wood that is
destined to constitute a table. When the wheelbarrow is completed, it
does not, like the table, begin to minister directly to