In much the same way society at large has its various institutions and tendencies, expressing themselves in values, which are more or less distinct but whose operation you cannot wholly separate in a given case. The distinctions among them are in the nature of organic differentiations within a whole.
Observe, next, that there is a sort of commensurability throughout the world of values, multifarious as it is. I mean that in a vague but real way we are accustomed to weigh one kind of value against another and to guide our conduct by the decision. Apart from any definite medium of exchange there is a system of mental barter, as you might call it, in universal operation, by which values are compared definitely enough to make choice possible. You may say that the things that appeal to us are often so different in kind that it is absurd to talk of comparing them; but as a matter of fact we do it none the less. We choose between the satisfaction of meeting a friend at the station and that of having our dinner at the usual time, between spending an hour of æsthetic improvement at the Metropolitan Museum and one of humanitarian expansion at the University Settlement, between gratifying our sense of honor by returning an excess of change and our greed by keeping it, between the social approbation to be won by correct dress and bearing and the physical ease of slouchiness. Almost any sort of value may come, in practice, to be weighed against almost any other sort.
Indeed this is implied in the very conception of value as that which has weight or worth in guiding behavior. Our behavior is a kind of synthesis of the ideas, or values, that are working in us in face of a given situation, and these may be any mixture that life supplies. The result is that almost any sort of value may find itself mixed up and synthetized with any other sort.
But the human mind, ever developing its instruments, has come to supplement this psychical barter of values by something more precise, communicable and uniform, and so we arrive at pecuniary valuation. This is in some respects analogous to language, serving for organization and growth through more exact communication; and just as language develops a system of words, of means of record (writing, printing, and the like), also of schools, and, withal, a literary and learned class to have special charge of the institution, so pecuniary valuation has its money, banks, markets, and its business class.
For our present purpose of discussing the general relation of pecuniary to other values, as æsthetic or ethical, it is of no great importance, I should say, to inquire minutely into the various kinds of the latter or their precise relations to one another. The large fact to bear in mind, in this connection, is that we have, on the one hand, a world of psychical values, whose reality is shown in their power to influence conduct, and, on the other, a world of prices, which apparently exists to give all kinds of psychical value general validity and exact expression, but which seems to do this in a partial and inadequate manner.
This, indeed, may be called the root of the whole matter: the fact that pecuniary value, whose functions of extension, of precision, of motivation, of organization, are so essential and should be so beneficent, appears in practice to ignore or depreciate many kinds of value, and these often the highest, by withholding pecuniary recognition; and, on the other hand, to create or exaggerate values which seem to have little or no human merit to justify such appraisal. Let us, then, inquire why its interpretation of life is so warped.
The answer to this I take to be, in general, that pecuniary valuation is achieved through an institutional process, and, like all things, bears the marks of its genesis. There are institutional conditions that intervene between psychical values and their pecuniary expression. These are, roughly, of two sorts, those that operate after pecuniary demand is formed, within the processes of exchange, and those that operate antecedently to the actual demand, in the larger social process. The former are technical conditions within the economic organization, and are studied by political economists; the latter spring from the social organization as a whole, and are usually regarded as outside the province of economics.
I may illustrate these two sorts of conditions by considering the pecuniary value of a work of art. Thus if a sculptor cannot sell his product for a price commensurate with its merit, this may be because, owing to lack of information, he has not come into touch with the market, although the market may be a good one. He has not found the group of buyers willing to pay what his work is worth. On the other hand, it may be because, owing to social conditions involving a low state of taste, there is no such group.
The former phase of the matter, since it lies within the familiar provinces of economics, I need not say much about. We all know that the processes of competition and exchange do not correspond to the economic ideal; that they are impaired by immobility, ignorance, monopoly, lack of intelligent organization, and other well-known defects. How serious these are, on the whole, I need not now inquire, but will pass on to those considerations that go behind pecuniary demand, and indicate why this is itself no trustworthy expression of the human values actually working in the minds of men at a given time.
Most conspicuous among them, perhaps, is the factor of class. The pecuniary market taken as a whole, with its elaborate system of money, credit, bargaining, accounting, forecasting of demand, business administration, and so on, involving numerous recondite functions, requires the existence of a technical class, which stands in the same relation to the pecuniary institution as the clergy, politicians, lawyers, doctors do to other institutions; that is, they have an intimate knowledge and control of the system which enables them to guide its working in partial independence of the rest of society. They do this partly to the end of public service and partly to their own private advantage; all technical classes, in one way or another, exploiting the institutions in their charge for their own aggrandizement. If the clergy have done this, we may assume that other classes will also: indeed it is mostly unconscious and involves no peculiar moral reproach. Much also is done that cannot be called exploitation, which may greatly affect values. The commercially ascendant class has not only most of the tangible power, but the prestige and initiative which, for better or worse, may be even more influential. It sets fashions, perhaps of fine ideals, perhaps of gross dissipations, which permeate society and control the market.