value and the standard of price, and secondly of gold and silver as measures on the one hand and mediums of circulation on the other. Because precious metals can be replaced by tokens in the process of circulation Berkeley comes to the conclusion that these tokens represent nothing, i.e., only the abstract idea of value.
SIR JAMES STEUART had so fully developed the theory of the ideal unit of measure of money, that his successors—unconscious successors since they do not know him—have added to it neither a new version nor even a new example. "Money, which I call of account, is no more than an arbitrary scale of equal parts, invented for measuring the respective value of things vendible. Money of account, therefore, is quite a different thing from money coin, which is price[1] and might exist, although there was no such thing in the world as any substance which could become an adequate and proportional equivalent, for every commodity. . . . Money of account . . . performs the same office with regard to the value of things, that degrees, minutes, seconds, etc., do with regard to angles, or as scales do to geographical maps, or to plans of any kind. In all these inventions, there is constantly some denomination taken for the unit.
- ↑ Price means here real equivalent in the sense commonly employed by English economic writers in the seventeenth century.
right in saying that by their progress the North American colonies "make it plain as daylight, that gold and silver are not so necessary for the wealth of a nation, as the vulgar of all ranks imagine."
