The most elementary form is that of the person who tells you where you can get something that you want—­a simple statement that someone is a barber or an inn-keeper, or gives music lessons, or has shoes for sale.  This may be accompanied by an effort to show that the goods offered are of specially good quality or have some feature that makes them particularly desirable, either to consumers in general or to those of a certain class.  This is all surely economic, so long as nothing but the truth is told.  Next we have an effort not only to supply existing wants and to direct them into some particular channel, but to create a new field, to make people realize a lack previously not felt; in other words to make people want something that they need.  This may be done simply by exhibiting or describing the article or it may require long and skillful presentation of the matter.  All this is still economic.  But it requires only a step to carry us across the line.  Next the enthusiastic advertiser strives to make someone want that which he does not need.  As may be seen, the line here is difficult to determine, but this sort of advertising is surely not economic.  So long as the thing not needed is not really injurious, however, the advertising cannot be called illegitimate.  It is simply uneconomic.  The world would be better off without it, but we may look for its abolition only to the increase of good judgment and intelligence among consumers.  When an attempt however, is made to cause a man to want something that is really injurious, then the act becomes illegitimate and should be prevented.  Another class of illegitimate advertising is that which would be perfectly allowable if it were truthful and becomes objectionable only because its representations are false.  It may be ostensibly of any of the types noted above.

As we have already noted, the material objects distributed by the librarian are valued not for their physical characteristics but for a different reason altogether, the fact that they contain stored ideas.  Ideas which, according to some, are merely the relative positions of material particles in the brain, and which are indisputably accompanied and conditioned by such positions, here subsist in the form of peculiar and visible arrangements of particles of printer’s ink upon paper, which are capable under certain conditions of generating in the human brain ideas precisely similar to those that gave them birth.  And although the book cannot think for itself, but must merely preserve the idea intrusted to it, without change, it is vastly superior in stability to the brain that gave it birth, so that thousands of years after that brain has mouldered into dust it is capable of reproducing the original ideas in a second brain where they may germinate and bear fruit.  How familiar all this is, and yet how perennially wonderful!  The miracle of it is sufficient excuse for this digression.