52 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the fact that only our power to change the actual situation by sacrificing labor or goods i. e., exchange creates values.
The third part of this chapter discusses in general how things are determined by each other. It investigates the problem of truth, knowledge as a whole in the flow of relativity, the whole being less true than its parts. Every perception, every institu- tion, only finds its sense in other things ; that is so with regard to law, the basis of which is not absolute justice, and with regard to art, the truth of which is the most perspicuous image of rela- tivity. We understand our ego through other people and other people through our ego. The highest condensation of this rela- tivity is money, " for in it the value of things, looked upon as their economic reaction on one another, has found its clearest expression." Money is the objectivation of the relation which as exchangeability plays a part in economics, but beyond that it is the expression for the formula that things are determined by each other, that only the mutuality of relations determines their being, and their being as they are. Thus money becomes sepa- rated from all other goods, and on it as onto sacred objects we project the relations as the symbol of which they afterward appear. Money as the symbol of relativity or, better, exchange- ability begins to be more and more nothing but a symbol.
The second chapter, "The Substance-Value of Money," 1 treat of a problem of special interest to every economist the question whether it is necessary that the substance of money should valuable in order to make money fit for the fulfilment of its function. Much thought has been given to this problem. From Aristotle upward, all through the Middle Ages, by French, English, and Italian philosophers of the eighteenth century ; bj the classical school of political economy, by bimetallists and anti-bimetallists by all of these has the problem been touched, 2 by none of them has it been solved. As far as I can look ovei the'literature, there exists no investigation which looks upon the question from a purely logical point of view and totally inde-
- Cf. TONNIES, Gemeinschaft und Geselhchaft, Leipzig, 1887.
'Vide, among others, ARISTOT., Pol. (1,3, 16 Schr.) ; MELANCTHON, Coop. Ref., XVI, 498 ; MONTANARI, Delia Moneta, 35 ; B. FRANKLIN, Remarks on the American Paper Money, 1765; RICARDO, Proposal for an Economical and Secure Currency; ROSCHER, Grundlagen der Nationalokonomie, 116 ; KNIES, Das Geld, 1885.
