Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/313

 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY 299

ments through which it becomes the content of a science, yet the dehmitations which it actually possesses are more or less con- formable to those arrangements (Anordnungen) — somewhat as a portrait fundamentally transforms the natural human appear- ance, and yet the one countenance stands a better chance than another of fitting into this radically alien composition. So we may measure the better or worse right of those scientific problems and methods. Thus the right to subject the historico-social phe- nomena to analysis according to form and content, and to bring the former into a synthesis, must rest upon two conditions, which may be verified only from the facts themselves. On the one hand it must be found that similar forms of socialization occur with quite dissimilar content, for wholly dissimilar purposes ; and per contra that interests similar in content clothe themselves in quite unlike forms of socialization, as their bearers or species of realiza- tion. A parallel appears in the fact that like geometrical forms occur with different substances, while like material occurs in the most various spatial forms ; or again in the fact that there is the same variation between logical forms and the cognitive content which they convey.

Both things are now as facts undeniable. In the case of human associations which are the most unlike imaginable in pur- poses and in total meaning, we find nevertheless similar formal relationships between the individuals. Superiority and subordina- tion, competition, imitation, division of labor, party structure, representation, inclusiveness toward the members and at the same time exclusiveness toward non-members, and countless similar variations are found, whether in a civic group or in a religious community, in a band of conspirators or an industrial organization, in an art school or in a family. However diverse, moreover, the interests may be from which the socializations arise,^^ the forms in which they maintain their existence may nevertheless be similar. Then, second, that interest which is one

" Simmel is constantly making unintended, but for that reason all the more significant, concessions to my claims, by dropping into use of process-concepts in place of form-concepts when he wants to be most exact. His word here is Vergesellschaftungen,