Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/62

 48 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

part of life from money. If in the introduction to the work Simmel says that not a single line of the whole book should be interpreted economically, this can only mean that it should not be interpreted merely economically. And the real meaning of it is the same as is incorporated in the fact that the system exceeds the singular phenomenon and belongs rather to the kingdom of ideas than to everyday realities.

From a higher standpoint the author looks down upon the market-place of life, the comings and goings of which seem so intricate, where people seem to be jumbled up, and where you look in vain for the Archimedean point from which the earth cannot be moved out of its poles, it is true that peaceful science will not do but from which it can be overlooked at a glance. The world as the great market-place, taken from a bird's-eye view, from which everything is seen in relation to everything else that is the view that Simmel shows us in his Philosophy of Money. Only an economic phenomenon like money, and this before all others, could in its totality give an image of the world in which everything is part of the whole. In his book Simmel gives the philosophic limits of any science, its premises on the one and its last consequences on the other side. The pre- and post-economic side of money is treated ; the author speaks of money, but through it he lets us see mankind and life.

In his first chapter, "Value and Money," Simmel opposes being to value, reality of being to valuing as categories. This is a hypothesis which differentiates reality as it indifferently fol- lows natural laws from any individually formed range of values. In the world of realities the subjectivity of which in a philo- sophic sense need not be entered upon here our ego is nothing but an atom ; in the world of values we are masters and creators. Nature does not care for what we care for ; she destroys what seemed to be made for eternity and conserves what seems doomed to destruction. No determination regulates the relation between reality and value ; similar to parallels they run side by side, and the synthesis that embraces both lies only where both lines meet in infinity.

Whether this principal difference is as great as Simmel sees