52 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL

logical significance of a judgment something psychological,
although only within and through a psychological process
can it obtain reality in consciousness. As unities, therefore,
 they are conceptual unities, and, as such, they may be
content for the individual consciousness, but they have no
actual historical origin as unities. The psychological actuality
 creates only parts of them or carries them on or
thinks of these contents as concepts. There is a psychological
 bearer of the totality only when they are conceived as
content in the individual mind. The empirical origin of the
single elements and forms of language and their practical
application in individual cases is a problem of individual
psychology. In this same field belongs the problem of the
transmission of cultural elements or the effectiveness of
law as a psychological element in the merchant, the criminal,
 and the judge.
In actuality, therefore, the origin is of an individual
psychological nature, not of a superindividual psychological
 nature. But there is not merely a single origin. The
formation and development result from the contributions
of a plurality of individual minds interacting with one another.
 As entities they have no origin at all. but are merely
a conceptual content.
Another similar suggestion about the existence of a
superindividual mind arises from the fact that, in case of
collective activity, not only the activity itself but also the
result appears as a unity. When a crowd destroys a
house or passes judgment, the sum of the individual actions
 appears as a single unitary occurrence, as the realization
 of a single concept. The unitary external occurrence
resulting from manifold subjective mental occurrences is
conceived as the result of a single mental process, that of
the collective mind. The unity of the objective appearance
is reflected in the assumed unity of its psychic cause, but