As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. This something, a sense-actualizing of the thought, is in importance fully the equal of the spoken, written, or drawn figures and other symbols of the mathematic. Here lies a deep and fruitful domain of inquiry, so far almost unexplored. Not even the basic notions have been correctly enunciated, and it is therefore quite impossible to-day to translate intelligibly the money-idea that underlay the barter and the bill business of Egypt, the banking of Babylonia, the book-keeping of China, and the capitalism of the Jews, Parsees, Greeks, and Arabs from Haroun-al-Raschid’s day. All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money--the one, _money as magnitude_, and the other, _money as function_.[892]

Economically, as in other ways, Classical man saw his world-around as a sum of bodies that changed their place, travelled, drove or hit or annihilated one another, as in Democritus’s description of Nature. Man was a body among bodies, and the Polis as sum thereof a body of higher order. All the needs of life consisted in corporeal quantities, and money, too, therefore represented such a body, in the same way as an Apollo-statue represented a god. About 650, simultaneously with the stone body of the Doric temple and the free statue true-modelled in the round, appeared the _coin_, a metal weight of beautiful impressed form. Value as a magnitude had long existed--in fact as long as this Culture itself. In Homer, a talent is a little aggregate of gold, in bullion and decorative objects, of a definite total weight. The Shield of Achilles represents “two talents” of gold, and even as late as Roman times it was usual to specify silver and gold vessels by weight.[893]

The discovery of the Classically formed money-body, however, is so extraordinary that we have not even yet grasped it in its deep and purely Classical significance. We regard it as one of the “achievements of humanity,” and so we strike these coinages everywhere, just as we put statues in our streets and squares. So much and no more it is within our power to do; we can imitate the shape, but we cannot impart the same economic significance thereto. The coin _as money_ is a purely Classical phenomenon--only possible in an environment conceived wholly on Euclidean ideas, but there creatively dominant over all economic life. Notions like income, resources, debt, capital, meant in the Classical cities something quite different from what they mean to us. They meant, not economic energy radiating from a point, but a sum of valuable objects in hand. Wealth was always a mobile _cash-supply_, which was altered by addition and subtraction of valuable objects and had nothing at all to do with possessions in land--for in Classical thinking the two were completely separate. Credit consisted in the lending of cash in the expectation that the loan would be repaid in cash. Catiline was poor because, in spite of his wide estates,[894] he could find nobody to lend him the cash that he needed for his political aims; and the immense debts of Roman politicians[895] had for their ultimate security, not their equivalent in land, but the definite prospect of a province to be plundered of its movable assets.[896]

In the light of this, and only in the light of this, we begin to understand certain phenomena such as the mass-execution of the wealthy under the Second Tyrannis, and the Roman proscriptions (with the object of seizing a large part of the cash current in the community), and the melting down of the Delphian temple-treasure by the Phocians in the Sacred War, of the art-treasures of Corinth by Mummius, and of the last votive offerings in Rome by Cæsar, in Greece by Sulla, in Asia Minor by Brutus and Cassius, without regard to artistic value when the noble stuffs and metals and ivory were needed.[897] The captured statues and the vessels borne in the triumphs were, in the eyes of the spectators, sheer cash, and Mommsen[898] could attempt to determine the site of Varus’s disaster by the places in which coin-hoards were unearthed--for the Roman veteran carried his whole property in precious metal on his person. Classical wealth does not consist in having possessions, but piling money; a Classical money-market was not a centre of credit like the bourses of our world and of ancient Thebes, but a city in which an important part of the world’s cash was actually collected. It may be taken that in Cæsar’s time much more than half of the Classical world’s gold was in Rome.

But when, from about Hannibal’s time, this world advanced into the state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was that men’s eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body, but a thing and not a person[899] and capable, therefore, of being thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique of its kind in all economic history. The properties of the coin were extended to apply to living objects, and the stock of men in the regions “opened up” to the plunderings of proconsuls and tax-farmers became as interesting as the stock of metal. A curious sort of double valuation developed. The slave had a market price, although ground and soil had not. He served for the accumulation of great uninvested fortunes, and hence the enormous slave-masses of the Roman period, which are entirely inexplicable by any other sort of necessity. So long as man needed only as many slaves as he could gainfully employ, their number was small and easily covered by the prisoners of war and judgment-debtors.[900] It was in the sixth century that Chios made a beginning with the importation of bought slaves (Argyronetes). The difference between these and the far more numerous paid labourers was originally of a political and legal, not an economic kind. As the Classical economy was static and not dynamic, and was ignorant of the systematic opening-up of energy-sources, the slaves of the Roman age did not exist to be exploited in work, but were employed--more or less--so that the greatest possible number of them could be maintained. Specially presentable slaves possessing particular qualifications of one sort or another were preferred, because for equal cost of maintenance they represented a better asset; they were loaned as cash was loaned; and they were allowed to have businesses on their account, so that they could become rich;[901] free labour was undersold--all this so as to cover at any rate the upkeep of this capital.[902] The bulk of them cannot have been employed at all. They answered their purpose by simply existing, as a stock of money in hand which was not bound up to a natural limit like the stock of metal available in those days. And through that very fact the need of slaves grew and grew indefinitely and led, not only to wars that were undertaken simply for slave-getting, but to slave-hunting by private entrepreneurs all along the Mediterranean coasts (which Rome winked at) and to a new way of making the proconsuls’ fortunes, which consisted in bleeding the population of a region and then selling it into slavery for debt. The market of Delos must have dealt with ten thousand slaves a day. When Cæsar went to Britain, the disappointment caused in Rome by the money-poverty of the Britons was compensated by the prospect of rich booty in slaves. When, for example, Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down of the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were, for Classical minds, one and the same operation--the transformation of corporeal objects into money.

In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money--money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. The specific style of this economic thinking appears already in the way in which the Normans of A.D. 1000 organized their spoils of men and land into an economic force.[903] Compare the pure book-valuation of these ducal officials (commemorated in our words “cheque,” “account,” and “checking”)[904] with the “contemporary” gold talent of the Iliad, one meets at the very outset of the Culture the rudiments of its modern credit-system, which is the outcome of confidence in the force and durability of its economic mode, and with which the idea of money in our sense is almost identical. These financial methods, transplanted to the Roman Kingdom of Sicily by Roger II, were developed by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (about 1230) into a powerful system far surpassing the original in dynamism and making him the “first capitalist power of the world”;[905] and while this fraternization of mathematical thinking-power and royal will-to-power made its way from Normandy into France and was applied on the grand scale to the exploitation of conquered England (to this day English soil is nominally royal demesne) its Sicilian side was imitated by the Italian city-republics, and (as their ruling patricians soon took the methods of the civic economy into use for their private book-keeping,) spread over the commercial thought and practice of the whole Western world. Little later, the Sicilian methods were adopted by the Order of the Teutonic Knights and by the dynasty of Aragon, and it is probably to these origins that we should assign the model accountancy of Spain in the days of Philip II, and of Prussia in those of Frederick William I.

The decisive event, however, was the invention--“contemporary” with that of the Classical coin about 650--of double-entry book-keeping by Fra Luca Pacioli in 1494. Goethe calls this in _Wilhelm Meister_ “one of the finest discoveries of the human intellect,” and indeed its author may without hesitation be ranked with his contemporaries Columbus and Copernicus. To the Normans we owe our modes of reckoning and to the Lombards our book-keeping. These, be it observed, were the same two Germanic stocks which created the two most suggestive juristic works of the early Gothic,[906] and whose longing into distant seas gave the impulses for the two discoveries of America. “Double-entry book-keeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton.... With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into an elegant system, and it may be called the first Cosmos built up on the basis of a mechanistic thought. Double-entry book-keeping discloses to us the Cosmos of the economic world by the same method as later the Cosmos of the stellar universe was unveiled by the great investigation of natural philosophy.... Double-entry book-keeping rests on the basic principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely as quantities.”[907]

_Double-entry book-keeping is a pure Analysis of the space of values, referred to a co-ordinate system, of which the origin is the “Firm.”_ The coinage of the Classical world had only permitted of arithmetical compilations with value-_magnitudes_. Here, as ever, Pythagoras and Descartes stand opposed. It is legitimate for us to talk of the “integration” of an undertaking, and the graphic curve is the same optical auxiliary to economics as it is to science. The Classical economy-world was ordered, like the cosmos of Democritus, according to _stuff and form_. A stuff, in the form of a coin, carries the economic movement and presses against the demand-unit of equal value-quantity at the place of use. _Our_ economy-world is ordered by _force and mass_. A field of money-tensions lies in space and assigns to every object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative effect-value,[908] which is represented by a book-entry. “_Quod non est in libris, non est in mundo._” But the symbol of the functional money thus imagined, that which _alone_ may be compared with the Classical coin, is not the actual book-entry, nor yet the share-voucher, cheque, or note, _but the act by which the function is fulfilled in writing_, and the rôle of the value-paper is merely to be the _generalized historical evidence_ of this act.

Yet side by side with this the West, in its unquestioning admiration of the Classical, has gone on striking coins, not merely as tokens of sovereignty, but in the belief that this evidenced money was money corresponding in reality to 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.[909] The jurisprudence, on the other hand, has not yet even recognized its coming task,[910] 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.[911]

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 and pieces of money are the same, to measure the value of a thing against the magnitude of a quantity of work. Here work is no longer an _effecting_ in a world of effects, a working which can differ infinitely from case to case as to inward worth and intensity and range, which propagates itself in wider and wider circles and like an electric field may be measured but not marked off--but the _result_ of the effecting, considered entirely materially, _that which is worked-up_, a tangible thing showing nothing noteworthy about it except just its extent.

In reality, the economy of the European-American Civilization is built up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to the inner quality--more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning, relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole world-economy since the discovery of the steam-engine has been the creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose high-grade work everything else would never have come into being. But this achievement is of creative thinking, not a quantum,[912] and its value is not to be weighed against a certain number of coins. Rather it _is_ itself money--Faustian money, namely, which is not minted, but _thought of as an efficient centre_ coming up out of a life--and it is the inward quality of that life which elevates the thought to the significance of a fact. _Thinking in money generates money_--that is the secret of the world-economy. When an organizing magnate writes down a million on paper, that million exists, for the personality as an economic centre vouches for a corresponding heightening of the economic energy of his field. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the word “Credit” for us. But all the gold pieces in the world would not suffice to invest the actions of the manual worker with a meaning, and therefore a value, if the famous “expropriation of the expropriators” were to eliminate the superior capacities from their creations; were this to happen, these would become soulless, will-less, empty shells. Thus, in fact, Marx is just as much a Classical, just as truly a product of the Romanist law-thought as Adam Smith; he sees only the completed magnitude, not the function, and he would like to separate the means of production from those whose minds, by the discovery of methods, the organization of efficient industries, and the acquisition of outlet-markets, alone turn a mass of bricks and steel into a factory, and who, if their forces find no field of play, do not occur.[913]

If anyone seeks to enunciate a theory of modern work, let him begin by thinking of this basic trait of all life. There are subjects and objects in every kind of life as lived, and the more important, the more rich in form, the life is, the clearer the distinction between them. As every stream of Being consists of a minority of leaders and a huge majority of led, so _every sort of economy consists in leader-work and executive work_. The frog’s perspective of Marx and the social-ethical ideologues shows only the aggregate of last small things, but these only exist at all in virtue of the first things, and the spirit of this world of work can be grasped only through a grasp of its highest possibilities. The inventor of the steam-engine and not its stoker is the determinant. The _thought_ is what matters.

And, similarly, thinking in money has subjects and objects: those who by force of their personality generate and guide money, and those who are maintained by money. Money of the Faustian brand is the _force_ distilled from economy-dynamics of the Faustian brand, and it appertains to the destiny of the individual (on the economic side of his life-destiny) that he is inwardly constituted to represent a part of this force, or that he is, on the contrary, nothing but mass to it.