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 advanced
 to the same degree. Our language has been greatly
enriched; yet the writing and speech of individuals has become
 more careless, trivial, and worthless. The machine
has become more intelligent than the workman. The advance
 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 nineteenth
 century was an individual with an extensive knowledge
 of the objectivity and of the forms of objective behavior.

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 objectivation
 of cultural values in special structures which guarantees
 their permanence and continuity, which creates the
social heritage. But for that objectivation, each generation
 would have to start anew.
But it is also that objectivation of these cultural prod-