Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/77

 SIM MEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY 63

Objective culture as the objectivation of intellect thus becomes a historical fact. Here we find what is dubious in biology, an inheritance of acquired qualities. The style of life is determined only by the relation to subjective and objective culture. The greater the division of labor, the more compli- cated becomes the relation for the subject. Goods are more and more separated from their producer; factory goods replace goods made to order. Because labor is subservient to an object- ive purpose, it stands in a more objective relation even to the worker. Thus we get the purely objective relation that every- body works for everybody else : the upper for the lower classes, and vice versa, the celebrated chemist in his laboratory for the peasant's wife who buys the colored neckerchief, and the work- ing man for everybody who is a consumer of the goods he pro- duces.

Fashion 1 is a symbol of the variety of our style of life, of the objectivity with which we all of us look upon our daily sur- roundings to which we are not bound by any of those personal feelings so deeply rooted in more conservative antiquity. Our surroundings are indifferent to us because they are exchangeable for money. Our style of life through money becomes more and more anti-individual. But Simmel also sees the tendencies going in an opposite direction by surpassing the objective moment, when, for instance, we replace inherited and dogmatic laws by more individual ones, or when the subjective faculties of woman call for a higher satisfaction because the objective character of matrimony and domestic economy has outgrown itself and leaves her dissatisfied. The parts that money and division of labor have played in economics are closely related. What we gain by the ascendency of objective intellect, we lose in soul and heart. But even here a last contrast remains ; the more money becomes a cause of indifferentism and the more everything becomes measurable by mammon, the more passion- ately the doors of that region are guarded which still remains the stronghold of our soul and where we still feel it our duty to oppose all mercenariness.

1 Vide SOMBART, loc. cit. t Vol. II, p. 327.