Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/79

 SIMMEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY 65

through these last years, there goes a feeling of tension, expecta- tion, and unsolved pressure as if the main point, the gist, the real sense and center of life and things, was still to come." There is a general tendency for the means to overgrow the ends ; an interesting example of this is the army: really nothing but an accumulation of latent energy, a means in case of war, which at the same time is to be avoided by the existence of standing armies, it has become a purpose in itself. The overgrowth of means over ends finds its culmination in the power outward life has over the life of our soul. It is not a scientific, but a mytho- logically childish thought, if we speak of an overcoming of, or a power over, nature ; as in nature there is no will opposed to ours. The machine, of which Ruskin has said that it is like a demon, who first makes men rich and happy, but afterwards wrenches their soul from them, shows us the relation of man to the outward world. "The sentence that we rule over nature by serving it has the awful reverse that we serve it by ruling over it." We become slaves of the process of production, of the products, their qualities and of everything surrounding us. 1 The contest between ends and means always strives after an adjustment, but "perhaps it is not at all the meaning of life ever to realize the permanency of a reconciled state." This is the real source of the restlessness of modern men, that restless- ness which has driven them from socialism to Nietzsche, from Hegel to Schopenhauer, from Bocklin to impressionism. As the modus of means money must play a part in this process of life, and, moreover, a double one the part as a means and the part as an end.

The second determination of style is of a temporary kind ; it has its foundation in rhythm, 2 as a temporary phenomenon. Man early rose above rhythm. He is no more bound to a definite pairing-time, remainders of which are still to be found among uncultivated nations. The dependence of the satisfaction of our needs upon the seasons gradually lessens. Civilization strives to overcome everything periodically rhythmical. Opposed to this


 * Vide ONCKEN, Geschichte der Nationalbkonomie, p. 44.

9 Vide KARL BUCHER, Arbeit und Rhythmus, passim, chaps, i, ii, ix ff.