THE ultimate " causes of price "-to use a Classical term-lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of " demand" and " supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitudes. These ultimate determinants are, on the one hand, the patterns of choice between alternatives of all individuals, and on the other, the pattern of technical limitation of resources such as labour time and raw materials and the transformation functions of these resources into commodities and services. It is possible to show, algebraically, how these billions of determinants operate to create and to change the structure of economic quantities (prices, volumes, etc.). Such algebraic demonstration, after the manner of the Lausanne school, though logically necessary, is not practically valuable in the solution of particular problems.' For this task we need to be able to divide the multitude of causes into a few broad workable categories, of which the Marshallian demand and supply analysis is an admirable example. It is not the purpose of this paper to overthrow the Marshallian methods, or to question their limited validity. Rather is it to suggest a new dichotomy of forces in the special case of market price in a competitive market, not into " demand " and " supply ", but into " price determining factors" and " quantity determining factors ". For many purposes it wduld seem that this new dichotomy is much more useful than the old, and leads to results which could not have been attained with the demand and supply apparatus. It should be noted carefully that the situation discussed in this paper is that of the determination of market price in a perfectly competitive market on a single " day ", the " day ", of course, being as short as we wish to make it and being defined by the condition that the market is cleared and that all transactions which can be accomplished under existing conditions have been accomplished. This itself, of course, is a fiction, though a useful and necessary one: our mind finds it difficult to grasp the slippery and continuous processes of the actual world without first " fixing " each position in our mind before proceeding to the next. The simplest approach to dynamic economics is through a succession of static pictures, just as the representation of movement on the screen is obtained through a rapid succession of stationary projections. In the "' market day " therefore we make the following assumptions: (i) the quantity of exchangeables (goods and money) possessed by all the people in the market does not change during the course of the " day ". All that happens is exchange, in the simplest and most literal sense of the world-i.e., a rearrangement of ownership of the goods and money in the market. At the end of the day some people have more money, some less; some have more commodity, some less, but the increases must be exactly balanced by the declines as the total quantities possessed by all marketers have not changed. (ii) We will assume that the price that clears the market, is discovered immediately and prevails all through the " day ", and that all transactions made during the " day" are made at that price. This assumption does not quite correspond -to reality: nevertheless if the " day " is sufficiently short no serious errors are likely to be introduced by it, and it enables us to sidestep anumber of highly