SUMMARY 
r HE preceding chapters illustrate the skeleton struc- 
ture of Simmel’s sociology. Apart from the topics 
selected, his works contain a great many other essays 
on specific social forms and general sociological problems. 
The phenomena dealt with are, however, sufficiently repre- 
sentative to suggest a more or less unified picture of the 
task of formal sociology. 
[t will be evident that, although drawing its data from 
the social life of all ages, its subject-matter is not the fac- 
tual content of the social situation, but its purely formal 
aspect. Its aim is to find correlations between determina- 
tive factors and sociological forms. Its purpose is not to 
find correlations between determinative factors and social 
conditions. 
Sociology is concerned with kingship and the state as 
forms of social organization, not as political institutions. 
It deals with the competitive system and large-scale pro- 
duction as types of social structures, not as phases of eco- 
nomic development. It is interested in law and morality 
in their formalistic aspect, as norms for specific relation- 
ships, not in their legal or ethical content. 
The subject-matter of sociology is therefore not the so- 
cial actuality as such. It rests upon an abstraction from 
the actuality like that of any other science. In sociology 
this abstraction results from a differentiation between the 
form and the content of the social actuality. This mental 
process of differentiation is its essential technique. As 
long as this technique is not mastered, the correlation prob- 
lems of the science will appear in the form of contingency 
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