There is nothing wrong with making money. But money, like Robert Service's ambition, can become the tail that wags the dog. Karl Llewellyn's observations of some forty years ago, on lawyers and money, still ring true. He observed "a brand of lawyer for whom law is making of a livelihood, a competence, a fortune. Law offers means to live, to get ahead. It is so viewed. Such men give their whole selves to it, in this aspect. Coin is their reward. Coin makes it possible to live. Coin is success, coin is prestige, and coin is power. Such lawyers, I take it, reflect rather adequately the standards of our civilization. They have perceived the mainspring of a money economy. They follow single-heartedly on their perception. Coin is, in this society, the measure of a man." [Karl Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush 119 (New York: Oceana Publications, 1951)]

Robert Hutchins relates the following anecdote about practicing law for money: "Seventy years ago a young New York lawyer went to see an old one in Wisconsin and found him in the evening reading by the stove in the center of his office. . . . When they finished discussing the case they had in hand, the Wisconsin lawyer said, 'Tell me, Mr. Debevoise, is it true what I hear, that there are men in New York City who are practicing law for money?'" [Robert Hutchins, "The University Law School," in The Law School of Tomorrow 5, 23 (David Haber & Julius Cohen, eds. 1968)]

All of this talk of money brings to mind an admonition by a psychotherapist, Stanley Keleman: "We do not live by bread alone. We must also satisfy our visions." [Stanley Keleman, The Human Ground--Sexuality, Self, and Survival 63 (1975)]. The question of course is how we respond to the tension within ourselves and between those who have made dramatically different choices in dealing with the impulse to live by bread alone and the impulse to seek our most elusive ideals.

On money as god in contemporary society, see John Lilly, Simulations of God 115-121 (New York, 1975). On the philosophical and psychological problem of money, see Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1991). On the mythological and archetypal dimensions of money, see Robert Sardello & Randolph Severson, Money & the Soul of the World (1983); Russell Lockhart, et. al. (eds.), Soul & Money (1982)

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