GENERAL INTRODUCTION
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ences against metaphysical encroachments. On the other
hand, he pointed out that no social science is purely em-
pirical, that it differentiates its subject-matter from the
actuality on the basis of a specific category of cognition
and shapes its data in forms which are themselves not em-
pirically obtained from investigations within that science.
It was out of these critical inquiries into the presup-
positions of the social sciences that he developed his formu-
lation of the task and the scope of a study of sociology and
its legitimation as an empirical science,
If it may be said that Kant’s critical philosophy is a
conciliation between rationalism and empiricism, then
Simmel’s critical philosophy is a similar conciliation be-
tween two divergent tendencies in his own special field.
The divergent tendencies existing in Simmel’s time in the
field of the social sciences were the tendency to claim ex-
clusive validity for the historical method and the tendency
to claim exclusive validity for the naturalistic method.
Simmel’s philosophy is a conciliation. He points out that
a complete understanding of the socio-historical actuality
requires both methods of approach, that they are mutu-
ally supporting and presuppose each other.
Simmel started from Kant. Like Kant’s, his philosophy
is relativistic. Like Kant, he distinguishes sharply be-
tween subject and object, between knowing mind and
known world, between the organizing functions of the
mind and the data of experience, between form and mat-
ter. But Simmel’s relativism is much less rigid than the
Kantian formalism. It is less purely intellectualistic, is
more elastic and flexible, and therefore wider in scope and
more comprehensive. It is a functional, a dynamic, a ge-
netic relativism. His epistemological relativism is not pri-
marily in terms of form and content, but in terms of pro-
cess and raw material. The product, knowledge, is a func-
