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GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
It is the same with religion. From contents which are 
also perceived and conceived on the planes of science 
and metaphysics, the religious function creates a new 
world by means of special emotional attitudes and special 
syntheses. It transforms these contents through special 
evaluations and constructs a new world-picture with di- 
mensions and perspective different from the empirical, 
the philosophic, or the artistic form. That world is a law 
unto itself; it has an immanent logic and a value and sig- 
nificance entirely independent of its correspondence to ob- 
jective actuality. 
And science, philosophy, art, and religion are not the 
only fundamental categories, not the only independent 
forms in which the human mind shapes the contents of 
reality. The world of values and the world of norms (Sollen) 
are also specific pictures of the universe which result from 
special ways of dealing with its contents. They are funda- 
mental in the sense that they cannot be derived from each 
other or from simpler elements.? 
In this distinction between the different fields of men- 
tal activity and, within these fields, between the form and 
the content, Simmel’s relativism reaches its widest scope. 
But the functional, dynamic character of his relativism 
enables him to reach, through and beyond these forms, a 
final unity in life itself. With the same relativistic dia- 
lectic with which he has first dissected the universe, he 
now co-ordinates those discrete worlds into a final synthe- 
sis which, although it can be formulated only in terms of 
two opposing relativities, is yet more than either because 
it embraces and transcends both. 
1 Religion, pp. 8-18. 
2 Phil. des Geldes, pp. 1-7; Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, pp. 1-12, 30- 
32: Hoptprobl. der Phil., p. 16.