THE LIFE OF GEORG SIMMEL 
(March 1, 1858—September 26, 1918) 
EORG SIMMEL was born in Berlin. His cradle 
G stood in a house on the corner of the Friedrich and 
Leipziger Strasse in the very heart of the city. As 
a metropolitan he was born, as a world-citizen he lived 
and died. He grew up a man with great breadth of vision 
and a consuming interest in all phases of human life. 
Although later professing the evangelical faith, Sim- 
mel was of Jewish descent. There are certain elements in 
his thinking which are characteristically Jewish. His gift 
for analysis and abstraction, the subtleness of his dialectic, 
and his use of analogy and symbols may well be attributed 
to his Semitic stock. Apart from his rich intellectual en- 
dowments, he was gifted with a keen appreciation of 
beauty and a fine intuitive understanding of human nature. 
At the age of twelve young Georg entered the gymna- 
sium, and after six years was admitted to the University 
of Berlin. Here he followed a regular course of four years 
of study, devoting most of his time to philosophy, psy- 
chology, and history. In 1881 Simmel obtained the degree 
of Doctor of Philosophy on a dissertation on Kant’s theory 
of matter (Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants physischer 
Monadologie) and three theses. 
Simmel had great teachers. He studied history under 
Droysen, Mommsen, von Sybel, von Treitschke, Grimm, 
and Jordan, psychology under Lazarus and Bastian, and 
philosophy under Harms and Zeller. It cannot be said that 
Simmel became an immediate adherent of any of these 
great men, however. He had too much individuality, too 
vil