INTRODUCTION

'N THE preceding books we have dealt with the philosophic
 inquiry into the presuppositions of the social
sciences and with sociology as one of the empirical social
 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 interpreting
 a whole range of phenomena in terms of a selected
 phenomenon as their symbol and essence.
In this sphere lie Simmel’s characteristic contributions
to the philosophy of culture. They have this formal similarity,
 that they are all attempts to reach a fundamental
understanding of a sphere of life by viewing a selected phenomenon
 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 religion,
 from Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche to the significance
 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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