Wealth & Money Quote by George Santayana

Santayana’s line lands like a cool rebuke to every fantasy that thought can stay pure, private, and unmediated. Language, he suggests, isn’t a decorative layer added onto ideas; it’s the currency that makes ideas spendable. You can have value without money, he grants: people can sense that one thing matters more than another, can feel gradations of importance, beauty, or urgency. But without a shared medium of exchange, those valuations can’t be compared, aggregated, argued over, or transferred. They remain local, intuitive, stubbornly incommunicable.

The money analogy is doing double work. It flatters language with the dignity of infrastructure (not mere ornament), while also warning that it’s an abstraction that inevitably simplifies. Currency lets you translate wildly different goods into a single scale, and that convenience comes with distortion. Language similarly allows “relative values” - subtle experiences, moral judgments, aesthetic impressions - to be converted into public, portable units: words. The conversion is powerful, and also lossy.

Context matters: Santayana, writing in an era increasingly confident in scientific categorization and social administration, is skeptical of any system that pretends to measure the human world without remainder. His subtext is anti-utopian and quietly anti-bureaucratic: you can’t run culture, ethics, or meaning on raw feeling alone, but once you standardize them into a common denominator, you invite the tyranny of the denominator. Language enables community and dispute; it also tempts us to mistake the ledger for the life.