80 . THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL

ness of constituting with others a unity is the only unity
in question. The consciousness of socialization is immediately
 its vehicle and inner significance, not in the sense
of a consciousness of constituting society in the abstract,
but in the sense of an awareness of the innumerable actual
relationships and a feeling and knowledge of influencing
and being influenced by others. The question as to how
society is possible is therefore a question as to the conditions
 that must be fulfilled to enable the procedures in the
individual consciousness to be processes of socialization.
To a certain extent that problem is the problem of
sociology. It searches out the processes, occurring in the
last analysis in individuals, which condition the fact of
their socialization. These procedures are not conceived as
temporally antecedent to and causing the socialization,
but as partial processes which in their synthesis are called
socialization. But there the method is inductive and the
emphasis lies on the synthesis and its form. Here the question
 must be understood in a more fundamental sense.
The problem is: What lies universally and a priori at the
basis of society, what presuppositions must be operative,
what prerequisites fulfilled, in order that concrete processes
 in the individual consciousness may actually be processes
 of socialization? What elements must be contained
in them in order that they may create a social unity out of
individual elements? This problem may be called the fundamental
 epistemological problem of sociology.
The aprioristic conditions which make society possible
cannot be indicated by single terms like the Kantian categories.
 Thev must be described somewhat in detail.
Three sociological a priori conditions will be enumerated
by way of illustration. hut there are probably a great many
there

The first might be roughly indicated as resulting from a