SIMMEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY.
"The difference between persons is not in wisdom, but in art." EMERSON.
IMMEASURABLE are the eternal hunting-grounds of knowledge, and innumerable the hunters who go out hunting for knowledge and truth ; but very narrow is the hunting-ground of the isolated individual in this our epoch of microscopic investigation. Only rarely, very rarely, such a truth-seeker exceeds the narrow dis- trict which belongs to him, and to him alone, in order to see more than this small world of his. It is the fate of the philoso- phy of our time to become thus narrowed. The high-flying thoughts which embraced the universe have been displaced by the "only saving" experiment by which we have learned a great deal, it is true, but behind which the great question mark still remains and which, though it provides us with the elements, never unveils the last cause.
If in this our time we come upon a book that shows nothing of the spirit of caste in philosophy, but tries to be nothing else than a philosophical image of the world as it is seen by an indi- vidual eye, this fact alone is sufficient to attract our attention. We are not rich in philosophical minds ; only a small number of those who teach philosophy at the universities can lay claim to this title of honor. Men like Mack or Dilthcy, Wundt or Spencer, belong to their number; of the younger philosophers, certainly Georg Simmel. His work, of which we are going to speak here, the Philosophy of Money, 1 is so absolutely an image of his personality that we cannot forbear to consider the tempera- ment through which he saw a fragment, or more than a fragment, of life.
Nervous to the fingertips, of the almost frightening sensibility of the neurasthenic, Simmel is one of the most ingenious inter- preters of psychic emotions, incomparable in the gift to feel the most subtle vibrations of the soul.
What we admire most in him is the contradiction or rather
1 Leipzig : Duncker & Humblot.
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