Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/67

 SIM MEL 'S PHIL O SO PHY OF MONEY 5 3

pendent from the historical realization of economics. Simmel is the first who undertakes to interpret the idea of valuation purely deductively. Certainly there exists an idea of money, as there exist natural laws, and the money that serves for economic transactions is only a manifestation of its meaning, as the single experiment is the manifestation of the natural law. But as the law of gravity does not become evident in reality, but only manifests itself in vacuo thus, we may not consider our money, as far as it serves economic purposes, as the manifestation of its pure meaning; but what we call money is, as it seems to me, only a substitute for money, the historical tendency of which is to accept more and more of that which constitutes the meaning of money and to remove what is opposed to it.

The question whether it is necessary for money to be valu- able in substance in order to measure values that is to say, whether there must exist an equality of quality between the measuring and the measured object x is not as easily answered in the affirmative as it seems at first sight. Only to the superficial observer it seems as if money should necessarily be valuable, as it is necessary for the instrument for measuring lengths to be long and for the weight to be heavy. Price as the expression for money, and goods, does not stand in this simple relation to each other; among others it is Philippovich who made this quite clear. The idea into which Simmel enters at length, without, however, being able to come to the last solution, is the attempt to do away with the simple comparison between goods and their prices which by nature have no qualitative relation to each other and to put in its stead the relation of two proportions in which the dependence of the formation of prices from the whole of eco- nomics is expressed. Doubtless the total quantity of money = M, and the total quantity of goods G, stand in a certain rela- tion to each other a fact which is clearly shown by the influ- ence an increase of the sum of goods has upon prices. 2 Just so,

1 Vide LAW, Money and Trade, considered with a proposal for supplying the nation with money; RosCHER, Grundlagen der Nationalokonomie, 1900, p. 340; MOMMSEN, Geschichte des rbmischen Munzwesens (1860), p. vi.

theorists of quantity.
 * Traces of this are already to be found in Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, and all