Note 891 — Chapter XIII · THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (A) MONEY

The increasing intensity of this thinking appears in the economic picture as a growth of the available money-mass, which is abstract and imagined and has nothing to do with the visible supply of gold as a ware. The “stiffening” of the money-market, for example, is a purely intellectual process played out in the hands of a small handful of men. The increasing energy of money-thinking consequently awakens, in every Culture, the feeling that the “value of money is going down”—enormously so, for example, in the time between Solon and Alexander—with reference, namely, to the unit of calculation. What actually happens is that the mercantile units of value have become artificial and no longer comparable with the primary and livingly experiential values of the peasant economy. In the end it ceases to matter in what figures the Attic treasure of the Delian League (454) or the sums involved in the peace-treaties of 241 and 201, or the booty of Pompey in 64 are reckoned, and whether we ourselves shall pass in a few decades from the milliards—still unknown in 1850, but commonplace to-day—to the billions. There is no common standard for the value of a talent in 430 and in 30 B.C., for gold, like cattle and corn, has continually altered not only its own numeration, but its significance within an ever-advancing urban economy. The only steady element is the fact that quantity of money—not to be confused with the stock of tokens and the means of payment—is an alter ego mirroring thought in money.