Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/312

 298 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

socialization.^ For everything else found within "society" and realized by means of it, and within its framework (Rahnien), is not "society" itself, but merely a content which builds or is built by this form of coexistence, and which indeed only together with "society" brings into existence the real structure, "society" in the wider and usual sense. That these two factors, inseparably united in reality, shall be separated in scientific abstraction, that the forms of reciprocity or socialization shall be brought meth- odologically under a unifying scientific viewpoint, in mental detachment from the contents through which alone they become socially actual — this seems to me the sole and the whole possi- bility of founding a special science of society as such. Only with such a science would the facts which we characterize as the socio-historical reality be actually projected upon the plane of the purely social. ^^

Now, however urgently such abstractions, which alone bring science into being out of the complexity or the unity of reality, may be demanded by the subjective needs of cognition, some legitimation for them must also reside in the structure of the objectivity itself; for only in a functional relationship of some sort to actuality can protection exist against unfruitful inquiries, against an accidental character of the concepts that pass as scien- tific. Mistaken as it is for a naive naturalism to assume that the thing given already connotes the analytic or synthetic arrange-

" At this point Professor Simmel appears to be partially aware of the non sequitur in his arguments. He can save himself only by the tour de force in the last sentence, "society and nothing else." Pressing this proviso to the most literal extreme, constructing a statical abstraction, and making it an object of thought, he of course, by the terms of the hypothesis, excludes analysis of every- thing except the mere statical forms which the abstraction has assembled. This abstraction, however, is not the reality of human experience, but merely its ghost. The moment he returns to life from this spectral region, he has occa- sion to pass from visions of astral bodies to analyses of vital processes.

tried to make in General Sociology, pp. 184, 185, 504, 508: namely, that the word "society" is worse than useless as a term of precision. We are far enough in analysis to see that we can do justice to our actual distinction, only by using some term of process, e.g., "association," or "associating." This would not be a mere verbal variation. It would be, and would advertise, a dis- tinct advance in thought.
 * "The foregoing paragraph is a capital illustration of the point which I