12 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL

merable minor forms of relationship and types of reciprocal
 action between persons. Although these are perhaps
trivial if viewed separately, in reality they constitute in
aggregate that network of relationships which surrounds
the larger formations and creates the actual unity of society.
 The actual life of society cannot be construed from
the structures which constitute the traditional subjectmatter
 of the social sciences. It would be a mere aggregate
of discontinuous systems if it were not for the intermediate
 operations of the innumerable smaller synthetic processes.
 Sociology therefore has to concern itself also with
the thin threads of those minor relationships. It is the
continuous repetition of these minor interactions which
builds and supports the great objectified structures; and
these primary processes which build society out of the immediate
 individual elements must therefore be investigated
 in a manner similar to that in which we investigate
the more complex processes and their objectified forms.
From this extension of the investigation to the minute
processes of socialization we may expect an advance in
our knowledge and understanding of the social life similar
to that made in physiology since the beginning of microscopy.
 Investigation before that time had been confined
to the large and separated organs. Since then the lifeprocess
 has appeared in its relation to its minute bearers,
the cells, and has been identified with the innumerable
and incessant reciprocities between them. The major organs,
 in which the life-bearers and their reciprocities have
assembled in special tissues and functions, would never
have made the unity of life intelligible if those countless
processes which play between the minutest elements had
not unmasked themselves as the real, the fundamental
life.l

1 Soz., pp. 18-21: Soz. Diff, p. 16.