Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/606

 590 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

that case, would be the total enjoyment, the existence of which guarantees to us the satisfaction of our wishes, but not that par- ticular quantum of which we actually take possession, because this could be replaced quite as easily by another. Our con- sciousness would in this case simply be filled with the rhythm of the subjective desires and satisfactions, without attaching any significance to the object mediating the satisfaction. The desire, therefore, which on its part came into existence only through an absence of feelings of satisfaction, a condition of want or limitation, is the psychological expression of the distance between subject and object, in which the latter is represented as of value.

This distance necessary to the consequence in question is produced in certain cases by exchange, sacrifice, abstinence from objects ; that is, in a word, the foregoing of feelings of satisfac- tion. This takes place, now, in the form of traffic cotemporane- ous between two actors, each of whom requires of the other the abstinence in question as condition of the feeling of satisfaction. The feeling of satisfaction, as must be repeatedly emphasized, would not place itself in antithesis with its object as a value in our consciousness if the value were always near to us, so that we should have no occasion to separate the object from that consequence in us which is alone interesting. Through exchange, that is, through the economic system, there arise at the same time the values of industry, because exchange is the vehicle or producer of the distance between the subject and the object which transmutes the subjective state of feeling into objective valuation. Kant once summarized his Theory of Knowledge in the proposition : "The conditions of experience are at the same time the condi- tions of the objects of experience." By this he meant that the process which we call experience and the conceptions which constitute its contents or objects are subject to the selfsame laws of the reason. The objects can come into our experience, that is, be experienced by us, because they are conceptions in us ; and the same energy which makes and defines the experience has also manifested itself in the structure of the objects. In the same sense we may say here : the possibility of the economic