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that he makes a clear distinction between history and science,
 is perhaps his most valuable contribution. A study
of his works will make possible an understanding of the
function and method of the social sciences which ought to
do much for real progress in these fields.
With regard to Simmel’s conception of sociology, there
have been critics who have objected to his differentiation
between form and content. As all scientific investigation
rests in the last instance upon an abstraction, there seems
little justification for a condemnation of his sociology on
that ground. The particular difficulty about the sociological
 abstraction is a problem of technique, not of method,
and there is no reason for assuming that it will not be solved
in time. It is due to the unfamiliarity with the new differentiation,
 not to any inherent obstacles. The differentiation
between the form and the content of the social life is in
essence not more unnatural than the similar differentiation
between the form and the content of the psychological
process in the individual mind. The differentiation of the
content of the social life in the fields of different social sciences
 has also become an established fact during the last
century. It has taken time, but it came about gradually
and naturally like the similar differentiation in the ancient
world. The early Greeks would probably have thought a
differentiation of the social life in the fields of ethics, jurisprudence,
 and political science an impossibility. Yet that
differentiation had been practically accomplished by the
time of the Roman lawyers, and it was only with that
differentiation that real progress began to be made. We
may therefore expect that in time the differentiation between
 the content and the form of society will come just as
naturally as that between the form and the content of a
psychological process or between the logical form and the
content of an argument.
Simmel’s conception of sociology and its subject-matter