Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/81

 SI MM EL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY 67

the centers of economic life, into the exchange, where life is in quickest movement ; it flows into the smallest form, into the check which makes it possible to transport great sums quickly from place to place. Money is round and wants to be rolling from hand to hand, from place to place, as the symbol of ever-flowing, never-resting life. Money has to be given away in order to be money. Only in movement it fulfils its function, it finds its sense. It becomes an equivalent to all things as far as they are economic, soaring above them, like a Platonic idea, like natural laws above the phenomena of nature. It becomes the last symbol for the movement of the world ; though being merely the instrument of a movement, it becomes the shape into which all things have to enter, if they want to measure each other's economic value. While as a single phenomenon it is the most transient thing of the outward, practical world, by its meaning it becomes the most constant of all ; its ideal sense, like that of law, is to give everything its measure. The last thing Simmel's book teaches us is the constant movement of the world, the relational character of life. The philosophic meaning of money is " that within the practical world it is the most definite incorpo- ration, the most evident realization of the general formula that things are determined by each other and that the mutuality of their relations determines their being and their being as they are."

Simmel's Philosophy of Money does not belong to any special branch of science, and therefore to all ; this the competent repre- sentatives of the sciences in question will never pardon him, and yet they all of them can learn a great deal from him, the lawyer as well as the economist, the aestheticist as well as the historian. The man who wrote this book had to be more than a small prince over a narrow province of science ; he had to be absolute master over the wide realm of human thought. And yet a tragic strain goes through the book. It means burdening every thought with the fate of the eternal Jew, if the author treats every last thought as if it was the one before the last. The eternal restlessness, the longing after ever deeper knowledge and insight, is a tragic fate for him who is seeking after truth. This trait which reveals