Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/596

 58o THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

far as they are actual — precisely in opposition to this has criticism shown the complete impracticability of the tendency ; and that even the extremest purpose, to be satisfied in art only with undif- ferentiated completeness of the object, must at last end in an abstraction. It will merely be the product of another selective principle. Accordingly, this is one of the formulas in which we may express the relation of man to the world, viz., from the unity and the interpenetration of things in which each bears the other and all have equal rights our practice not less than our theory constantly abstracts isolated elements, and forms them into unities relatively complete in themselves. Except in quite general feelings, we have no relationship to the totality of being. Only when in obedience to the necessities of our thought and action we derive perpetual abstractions from phenomena, and endow these with the relative independence of a merely subjective coherence to which the continuity of the world-movement as objective gives no room, do we reach a relationship to the world that is definite in its details. Indeed, we may adopt a scale of values for our culture systems, according to the degree in which they combine the demands of our singular purposes with the possibility of passing over without a gap from each abstraction which they present to the other, so that a subsequent combi- nation is possible which approximates that objective coherence and unity. Accordingly, the economic system of the world is assuredly founded upon an abstraction, that is, upon the relation of reciprocity and exchange, the balance between sacrifice and gain ; while in the actual process in which this takes place it is inseparably amalgamated with its foundations and its results, the desires and the satisfactions. But this form of existence does not distinguish it from the other territories into which, for the pur- poses of our interests, we subdivide the totality of phenomena. The objectivity of economic value which we assume as defin- ing the scope of economics, and which is thought as the inde- pendent characteristic of the same in distinction from its subjective vehicles and consequences, consists in its being true of many, or rather all, subjects. The decisive factor is its exten- sion in principle beyond the individual. The fact that for one