The relation of a portion of the surplus-value, of money-rent — for
 money is the independent expression of value — to the land is in itself
 absurd and irrational; for the magnitudes which are here measured by one
 another are incommensurable — a particular use-value, a piece of land of
 so many and so many square feet, on the one hand, and value, especially
 surplus-value, on the other. This expresses in fact nothing more than that,
 under the given conditions, the ownership of so many square feet of land
 enables the landowner to wrest a certain quantity of unpaid labour, which the
 capital wallowing in these square feet like a hog in potatoes has realised.
 [Written in the manuscript here in brackets, but crossed out, is the name
 "Liebig".] But prima facie the expression is the same as if one
 desired to speak of the relation of a five-pound note to the diameter of the
 earth. However, the reconciliation of irrational forms in which certain
 economic relations appear and assert themselves in practice does not concern
 the active agents of these relations in their everyday life. And since they are
 accustomed to move about in such relations, they find nothing strange therein.
 A complete contradiction offers not the least mystery to them. They feel as
 much at home as a fish in water among manifestations which are separated from
 their internal connections and absurd when isolated by themselves. What Hegel
 says with reference to certain mathematical formulas applies here: that which
 seems irrational to ordinary common sense is rational, and that which seems
 rational to it is itself irrational. [Hegel, Encyclopädie der
 philosophischen Wissenschaften in Grundrisse, 1. Teil, Die Logik.
 In: Werke, Band 6, Berlin, 1840, S. 404. — Ed.] When
 considered in connection with the land area itself, a rise in the mass of rent
 is thus expressed in the same way as a rise in the rate of rent, and hence the
 embarrassment experienced when the conditions which would explain the one case
 are lacking in the other.