erudite rather than popular.[1] I have renounced the advantages of a pleasing style to obtain the greater advantage of scientific treatment. My aim is with clearness and certainty to reconstruct the ideas at the bottom of the prevailing rules and ordinances about money.
I am sorry that I am not able to enter into the merits of my predecessors, Richard Hildebrand, Ignaz Gruber, Karl Knies, Lexis and Bamberger, and many others. To write a full literature of the subject would be a special historical work in itself.
I am making a first sketch, which others must complete.
My heaviest debt is to G. Th. Fechner, who never wrote a line on currency, and indeed knew nothing about it. From him, for example, from his little book on the Soul,[2] we learn how to distinguish the essential from the accidental, and, if anyone says that my own aim has been to discover the soul of money, well, so be it.
Strassburg,
July 5th, 1905.
