238 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL 
life of our period is the fact that in many fields objective 
culture has outrun personal culture. The things which 
form the factual contents of our lives, such as household 
goods, means of transportation, products of science, art, 
and technique, have become much more cultivated, while 
personal culture, at least of the higher classes, has not ad- 
vanced to the same degree. Our language has been greatly 
enriched; yet the writing and speech of individuals has be- 
come more careless, trivial, and worthless. The machine 
has become more intelligent than the workman. The ad- 
vance of objective over subjective culture which occurred 
in the nineteenth century found expression in a change in 
educational ideals. The eighteenth-century education, in 
so far as it aimed at the formation of cultured individuals, 
was directed toward the development of inner values and 
personal qualities. The cultured individual of the nine- 
teenth century was an individual with an extensive knowl- 
edge of the objectivity and of the forms of objective be- 
havior. 
This discrepancy is merely one of the phenomena which 
indicate the strange relationship between social life and its 
products on the one hand and the fragmentary contents 
of the individual existence on the other hand. In language, 
morals, political structure, religious dogma, literature, and 
technique, there has accumulated the labor of countless 
generations. They form the substantialized spirit of the 
past, the crystallized thought of our ancestors, in which a 
single individual participates as much as he will or can 
without ever being able to exhaust it. It is this objectiva- 
tion of cultural values in special structures which guaran- 
tees their permanence and continuity, which creates the 
social heritage. But for that objectivation, each genera- 
tion would have to start anew. 
But it is also that objectivation of these cultural prod-