INTRODUCTION 
'N THE preceding books we have dealt with the philo- 
sophic inquiry into the presuppositions of the social 
sciences and with sociology as one of the empirical so- 
cial sciences. There remains for us, therefore, to deal with 
that part of Simmel’s work which lies in that other field of 
philosophical inquiry flanking the empirical sciences of the 
socio-historical actuality, namely, social metaphysics. 
In this field the results of the different social sciences 
are correlated with the results of other sciences and 
brought to completion. In this field the metaphysical need 
for a unitary picture satisfies its demands by synthesizing 
the fragmentary results of the empirical inquiries or by in- 
terpreting a whole range of phenomena in terms of a se- 
lected phenomenon as their symbol and essence. 
In this sphere lie Simmel’s characteristic contributions 
to the philosophy of culture. They have this formal simi- 
larity, that they are all attempts to reach a fundamental 
understanding of a sphere of life by viewing a selected phe- 
nomenon of that sphere as its characteristic expression. 
In all these studies the thought movement proceeds from 
the sphere to the specific phenomenon and from there back 
to the totality of the sphere. In this way Simmel proceeds 
from a single religious phenomenon to the meaning of reli- 
gion, from Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche to the sig- 
nificance of philosophy, from Rembrandt and Rodin to the 
meaning of art, from money to modern civilization, and 
finally from Goethe to the meaning of life itself. In this 
manner he searches in the single appearance of each sphere 
for the meaning of the whole. 
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