Mainly, in classical thinking, demand was taken for granted. Having utility, a thing must be limited in volume relative to the desires for it in order to take on a price; no one will pay for what he does not want; or pay for what he wants unless he has to. Goods may be so plentiful relative to the desires for them as to be free; not that they are not goods, that they have no utility--but, as later thought would have it, that they have no marginal utility. Classical thinking, however, was innocent of these utility refinements. Money demands were objectively evident; mainly they were taken as self-explanatory. People buy with their money the things that they want at their prices--in view, of course, of other things at their prices. So much was by mere inspection plain--too plain to need stressing. Demands take on the form of offers of money units. As such, these demands were translatable into a schedule of the various volumes of goods purchasable at the respective price ordinates on the demand curve or schedule. That market price reports a ratio of exchange between price-thing and priced-thing was, to be sure, a mere commonplace. But money quantities, not ratios of money to things, were on the demand side of the ratio. In the lack of careful analysis, or even of any pressing occasion for it, it was easy to think of a money total of demands--as the sum, for example, of the following five price offers for hats: 9 dollars for 1 hat; 8 dollars for 1 hat; 7 dollars for 1 hat; 6 dollars for 1 hat; 5 dollars for 1 hat; totaling, however, somehow, not into 35 dollars for 5 hats, but only into 25 dollars for 5 hats.

But there did nevertheless appear to be a total, though there was manifestly something amiss about the mathematics of it. But plainly five hats could find buyers on the basis of five dollars per hat. At this price the total of the five payments deriving from the five quite disparate demand ratios, was easily, though loosely, taken to make up into one money-demand total, whereas accurately there was merely a purchase-price total. The paradox in the attempt to add together different ratios escaped attention--precise thinking entangled in an inadequate terminology--as for that matter it still is. It is indeed difficult enough to total a series of identical ratios. Try it; 2:1, plus 2:1, plus 2:1--total into 6:3--just another two-toone ratio.

Comfortably, and in the main safely, these classical folk got along with utility without any marginal utility derivative, and found it to suffice that each one of us with his money buys the thing that at its price he prefers to anything else at its price. A hat bought at 5 that, if I must, I should have paid 9 to get, has attractiveness-I have a desire for it? Yes, obviously. In the ratio sense also? To be sure--if you insist--let it go at that. A buyer's surplus, then, of 4, through the divergence of my price-offer ratio from the market exchange ratio? Yes, I admit it--never earlier having thought of it, and not being keen about it now: but what is the use?

There was, however, implicit in the naïve classical view of demand the obvious fact of deciding to offer money for a good, or the willingness to take it, up to a certain price limit--implicit, therefore, the essential facts in all these utility and marginal utility refinements; and finally, therewith, the fact that a maximum price offer presumes a choice of one marginal utility, at its price, as against any alternative marginal utility, at its price, and therefore specifically against the ranking alternative marginal utility. . .