the economics in thought. In just the same way, even within the Gothic age, we took over Roman law with its equating of things to bodily magnitudes, and the Euclidean mathematic, which was built upon the concept of number as magnitude. And so it befell that the evolution of these three intellectual form-worlds of ours proceeded, not like the Faustian music in a pure and flowerlike unfolding, but in the shape of a progressive emancipation from the notion of magnitude. The mathematic had already achieved this by the close of the Baroque age.[1] The jurisprudence, on the other hand, has not yet even recognized its coming task,[2] but this century is going to set it, and to demand that which for Roman jurists was the self-evident basis of law, namely, the inward congruence of economic and legal thought and an equal practical familiarity with both. The conception of money that was symbolized in the coin agreed precisely with the Classical thing-law, but with us there is nothing remotely like such an agreement. Our whole life is disposed dynamically, not statically and Stoically; therefore our essentials are forces and performances, relations and capacities — organizing talents and intuitive intellects, credit, ideas, methods, energy-sources — and not mere existence of corporeal things. The "Romanist" thing-thought of our jurists, and the theory of money that consciously or unconsciously starts from the coin, are equally alien to our life. The vast metallic hoard to which, in imitation of the Classical, we were continually adding till the World War came, has indeed made a rôle for itself off the main road, but with the inner form, tasks, and aims of modern economy it has nothing to do; and if as the result of the war it were to disappear from currency altogether, nothing would be altered thereby.[3]
Unhappily, the modern national economics were founded in the age of Classicism. Just as statues and vases and stiff dramas alone counted as true art, so also finely stamped coins alone counted as true money. What Josiah Wedgwood (1758) aimed at with his delicately toned reliefs and cups, that also, at bottom, Adam Smith aimed at in his theory of value — namely, the pure present of tangible magnitudes. For it is entirely consonant with the illusion that money
- ↑ Vol. I, Ch. II.
- ↑ P. 81.
- ↑ In our Culture the credit of a country rests upon its economic capacity and the political organization thereof — which imparts to the operations and bookings of finance the character of real money-creations — and not on any quantity of gold that may be put into this or that. It is the Classicist superstition that raises the gold reserve to the status of an actual measure of credit — actual in that the level of credit is thereby made dependent, not upon "will," but upon "can." But the current coins are wares, which, relatively to national credit, possess a price — the poorer the credit, the higher the price of gold — so that thenceforth it can only be upheld against that of other wares. Thus gold is measured like other wares against the unit of book-reckoning, and not vice versa as the term "gold standard" suggests. It serves also as means of payment in minor transactions, as for that matter a postage-stamp does. In old Egypt (whose money-thought is astoundingly like the Western) there was nothing resembling the coin even under the New Empire. The written transfer was entirely sufficient, and the Classical coins that filtered in from 650 to the founding of Alexandria and the Hellenistic régime were usually cut to pieces and reckoned by weight as a ware.
