64 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL 
That the term “historical law” has a very different 
meaning from that of natural law is evident. It is merely 
a formulation for the relation between conceptual unities 
treated as a single phenomenon without any regard for the 
actually effective forces within the composing elements. 
Historical laws are special laws, laws for occurrences within 
special fields which are conceived as separate from and in- 
dependent of the single elements on the one hand and the 
wider cosmic circle on the other. They result from an ex- 
treme simplification of very complex material on the basis 
of presuppositions which imply a social and historical re- 
alism, a conception of certain phases of social and histori- 
cal life as unities of independent reality. 
Appearances of considerable internal difference are com- 
pared and treated as if they were identical. The state, re- 
ligion, culture, the forms of production, the position of 
women, and innumerable other concepts of identical logical 
content are observed in certain relations which, because 
they are repeated, are considered inevitable. But no two 
of these cases are actually identical. The law which is de- 
duced from the observation of one situation and its results 
is in reality valid for only that one case. Without an in- 
vestigation into the single elements, we can never be sure 
that the actual forces do not lie just in those factors in 
which the cases differ, and we can never be certain that 
the differences are not more fundamental than the similar- 
ities. 
The observed correlation between conceptual unities 
which result from a synthetic view of pluralities of coex- 
istent phenomena does not yield any information regarding 
the actually effective elements and gives no guaranty of 
repetition. The historical law does not go down to primary 
forces; and this is even more evident in those laws which 
profess to explain the historical development of social in-