Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/333

 THE PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY 319

sciousness of being a societary existence? In such elements in and of themselves society is not yet given. In the forms of re- action between them, society is already actual. What, then, are the subjective conditions, in principle, on the basis of which the individuals fitted out with such impulses bring society into exist- ence in general, what is the apriori which makes possible and forms the empirical structure of the individual in so far as it is social? How are not merely the empirically emerging, separate formations possible, which stand under the universal concept society, but society in general as an objective form of subjective souls ?^^

It is a somewhat vain question whether the researches into the epistemology of society which are to be exemplified by these out- lines belong in social philosophy or are properly parts of sociol- ogy. Supposing they are a border territory between the two methods, the security of the sociological problem as above described, and its boundaries with respect to philosophical prob- lems, suffer therefrom as little as the definiteness of the ideas of day and night suffers from the fact that there is twilight, or the conception of man and brute from the possibility that perhaps a missing link may be found which may combine the characteristics of the two in a way which we have no means of analyzing. Since the sociological question deals with the abstraction of that which alone, in the complex experience that we call social life, is actually society, i. e., socialisation; since the sociological question elimi- nates from the purity of this concept everything which is realized historically, to be sure, only within society, which however does not constitute society as such, as a unique and autonomous form of existence — a completely unequivocal nucleus of tasks is thereby constituted. It may be that the periphery of this range of problems temporarily or permanently comes in contact with

"'At this point Simmel introduces an excursus of 19 pages under the title Wie ist ' Gesellschaft moglich?" Partly as a way of emphasizing the conten- tion that it is a waste of energy to attempt to rehabilitate the term society as an instrument of precision, we shall publish in the January number of this Journal a translation of this passage. The reminder of the present translation contains the passage with which Simmel closes the chapter after the excursus, p. 45-