76 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL 
ment, in the history of religions and in that of art. The 
first point to be determined, therefore, is what competi- 
tion means as a pure form of human behavior, what kind 
of relationship between individuals it really is. But, apart 
from this, sociology must be able to answer the following 
questions: Under what circumstances does it come into 
existence? How does it develop? What modifications does 
it undergo through the peculiar character of its object? 
Through what contemporary formal or material delimita- 
tions of society is it intensified or retarded? How does 
competition between individuals differ from that between 
groups? 
The method of sociology is therefore like the method 
of the social sciences, but applied to a field of investiga- 
tion which is obtained by abstracting the forms of sociali- 
zation from the total social actuality. It is because this 
abstraction must precede that in the application of the 
method there arise difficulties of technique. There is no 
unquestioned technique available by which this process of 
abstraction can be guided and the fundamental sociological 
concept applied. The technique of the investigation is 
therefore not free from intuitive and subjective aspects. 
The methodological necessity for keeping the three as- 
pects of the social phenomena separate and distinct is 
crossed by the difficulty of maintaining the series inde- 
pendent of one another and by a desire for a composite pic- 
ture of the actuality which shall harmonize all three. Some 
problems will seem to belong now in one category and now 
in another, and even when they are definitely recognized 
as belonging to the one or the other, the complete abstrac- 
tion is perhaps never possible. Poverty may be regarded 
merely as a material condition of certain separate individ- 
ual existences, but it may also be regarded as a sociological 
phenomenon. It may be viewed as the result of certain