In closing, let us note that financial imagination does not always have as its goal the enriching of an individual or of a closely limited group of associates: it can aim higher, act on greater masses, address itself strenuously to a problem as complex as the reformation of the finances of a powerful state. All the civilized nations count in their history men who imagined a financial system and succeeded, with various fortunes, in making it prevail. The word "system," consecrated by usage, makes unnecessary any comment, and relates this form of imagination to that of scientists and philosophers. Every system rests on a master-conception, on an ideal, a center about which there is assembled the mental construction made up of imagination and calculation which, if circumstances permit, must take shape, must show that it can live. Let us call to mind the author of the first, or at least, of the most notorious of these "systems." Law claimed that he was applying "the methods of philosophy, the principles of Descartes, to social economy, abandoned hitherto to chance and empiricism." His ideal was the institution of _credit_ by the state. Commerce, said he, was during its first stage the exchange of merchandise in kind; in a second stage, exchange by means of another, more manageable, commodity or universal value, security equivalent to the object it represented; it must enter a third stage when exchange will be made by a purely conventional sign having no value of its own. Paper represents money, just as the latter represents goods, "with the difference that the paper is not security, but a simple promise, constituting credit." The state must do systematically what individuals have done instinctively; but it must also do what individuals cannot do--create currency by printing on the paper of exchange the seal of public authority. We know the history of the downfall of this system, the eulogies and criticisms it has received:--but because of the originality and boldness of his views, the inexhaustible fecundity of his lesser inventions, Law holds an undisputed place among the great imaginative minds. III We said above that commerce, in its higher manifestations, is a kind of war.[135] Here, then, would be the place to study the military imagination. The subject cannot be treated save by a man of the profession, so I shall limit myself to a few brief remarks based on personal information, or gleaned from authorities.