Wealth & Money Quote by George Santayana

Santayana likens language to money, the medium that turns many incommensurable feelings and judgments into something publicly comparable. People can feel that one thing is better than another, just as barterers can prefer one good to another, yet without a shared currency those preferences do not become prices that coordinate exchange. Language plays the same role for thought and value: it creates a common denominator by which private impressions are translated into public meanings, allowing argument, law, science, and everyday cooperation to proceed.

The analogy also highlights the conventional and symbolic nature of both systems. Money has value because a community accepts it; words work because a community uses them. Trust, habit, and institutions stabilize both, and both enable a scale and speed of interaction otherwise impossible. With language, isolated experiences become narratives, reasons, and norms; a solitary sense of right or beauty becomes intelligible to others and open to contestation.

Yet Santayana hints at the cost of conversion. A price never exhausts the worth of a life, a landscape, or a love; a sentence never fully captures the texture of pain, the glow of color, the taste of a melody. The common denominator smooths away local contours. Language reduces, selects, and organizes, and in doing so it can distort, flatten, and even falsify. Cliche and jargon are like inflation and counterfeit: they erode purchasing power and corrode trust.

As a naturalist attentive to feeling and essence, Santayana treats immediate experience as primary and language as a powerful but secondary tool. Value is first felt; only afterward is it named and negotiated. The lesson is double-edged: cultivate the medium that makes shared life possible, but do not mistake the symbol for the thing symbolized. Use language to trade meanings wisely, while remembering what remains priceless beyond its denominators.