qualitative measures. Now gold is no longer measured against the cow, but the cow against the gold, and the result is expressed by an abstract number, the price. Whether and how this measure of value finds symbolic expression in a value-sign — as the written, spoken, or represented number-sign is, in a sense, number — depends on the economic style of the particular Culture, each of which produces a different sort of money. The common condition for the appearance of this is the existence of an urban population that thinks economically in terms of it, and it is its particular character that settles whether the value-token shall serve also as payment-medium; thus the Classical coin and probably the Babylonian silver did so serve, whereas the Egyptian deben (raw copper weighed out in pounds) was a measure of exchange, but neither token nor payment-medium. The Western and the "contemporary" Chinese bank-note,[1] again, is a medium, but not a measure. In fact we are accustomed to deceive ourselves thoroughly as to the rôle played by coins of precious metal in our sort of economy; they are just wares fashioned in imitation of the Classical custom, and hence, measured against book-values of credit money, they have a "price."
The outcome of this way of thinking is that the old possession, bound up with life and the soil, gives way to the fortune, which is essentially mobile and qualitatively undefined: it does not consist in goods, but it is laid out in them. Considered by itself, it is a purely numerical quantum of money-value.[2]
As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the centre of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. And with this the trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master. Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business thinking. It presupposes the productive economy of the land, and, therefore, is always primarily acquisitive, for there is no third course. The very words "acquisition," "gain," "speculation," point to a profit tricked off from the goods en route to the consumer — an intellectual plunder — and for that reason are inapplicable to the early peasantry. Only by attuning ourselves exactly to the spirit and economic outlook of the true townsman can we realize what they mean. He works not for needs, but for sales, for "money." The business view gradually infuses itself into every kind of activity. The countryman, inwardly bound up with traffic in goods, was at once giver and taker, and even the trader of the primitive market was hardly an exception to this rule. But with money-traffic there appears between producer and consumer, as though between two separate worlds, the third party, the middleman, whose thought is dominated a priori by the business side of life. He forces the producer to offer, and the consumer to inquire of him. He elevates mediation
