ABSTRACT
Liquidity is a raw material of knowledge, and knowledge is a 'raw material' of value. Those objects are valued, which we know to be useful. The value we assign to them depends on the precision of our supposed knowledge of their capacities to please and sustain us. Liquidity is, in some sense and degree, a substitute for knowledge. Even if we thus claim that the nature and need of liquidity springs in all cases from one root, namely the need to postpone choice until the data are more adequate or their interpretation more distinct, yet we have to admit that this tree spreads into many branches. The transactions motive and the speculative motive may, by the appeal to their common source in lack of knowledge, be shown to be essentially the same. In all but this basic origin they appear perhaps very different. Yet they have one further character in common.
