12 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL 
merable minor forms of relationship and types of recipro- 
cal action between persons. Although these are perhaps 
trivial if viewed separately, in reality they constitute in 
aggregate that network of relationships which surrounds 
the larger formations and creates the actual unity of soci- 
ety. The actual life of society cannot be construed from 
the structures which constitute the traditional subject- 
matter of the social sciences. It would be a mere aggregate 
of discontinuous systems if it were not for the intermedi- 
ate operations of the innumerable smaller synthetic proc- 
esses. Sociology therefore has to concern itself also with 
the thin threads of those minor relationships. It is the 
continuous repetition of these minor interactions which 
builds and supports the great objectified structures; and 
these primary processes which build society out of the im- 
mediate individual elements must therefore be investi- 
gated in a manner similar to that in which we investigate 
the more complex processes and their objectified forms. 
From this extension of the investigation to the minute 
processes of socialization we may expect an advance in 
our knowledge and understanding of the social life similar 
to that made in physiology since the beginning of micros- 
copy. Investigation before that time had been confined 
to the large and separated organs. Since then the life- 
process has appeared in its relation to its minute bearers, 
the cells, and has been identified with the innumerable 
and incessant reciprocities between them. The major or- 
gans, in which the life-bearers and their reciprocities have 
assembled in special tissues and functions, would never 
have made the unity of life intelligible if those countless 
processes which play between the minutest elements had 
not unmasked themselves as the real, the fundamental 
life.l 
1 Soz., pp. 18-21: Soz. Diff, p. 16.