But the earth is actual and natural, and money is abstract and artificial, a mere “category”--like “virtue” in the imagination of the Age of Enlightenment. And therefore every primary, pre-civic economy is dependent upon and held in bondage by the cosmic powers, the soil, the climate, the type of man, whereas money, as the pure form of economic intercourse within the waking-consciousness, is no more limited in potential scope by actuality than are the quantities of the mathematical and the logical world. Just as no view of facts hinders us from constructing as many non-Euclidean geometries as we please, so in the developed megalopolitan economics there is no longer any inherent objection to increasing “money” or to thinking, so to say, in other money-dimensions. This has nothing to do with the availability of gold or with any values in actuality at all. There is no standard and no sort of goods in which the value of the talent in the Persian Wars can be compared with its value in the Egyptian booty of Pompey. Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional _dictatorship of money_, though taking different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian’s time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place. Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world-city, the centre in which the course of a world-history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of “the provinces.” The “provinces” are now everything whatsoever--land, town, _and_ city--except these two or three points. There are no longer noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hellenes and Barbarians, believers and unbelievers, _but only cosmopolitans and provincials_. All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events, all habits of life, all views of the world.