SOURCE: "The Sociology of Georg Simmel," in Georg Simmel, edited by Lewis A. Coser, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965, pp. 58-63.

In the following excerpt originally published in a 1912 book-length study of German philosophy in the nineteenth century, Bougle views Simmel as essentially a psychological thinker.

In the large volume which he entitles Sociology: Investigations into the Forms of Association, Simmel claims that he is not offering a system but rather a great number of examples designed to show the kinds of generalizations one can make in sociology; and he does this if only that he might be able to use what Descartes described as the appropriate "bias."

Why is it that history neither is nor can be a science? Perhaps it is because, in the last analysis, the subject matter of history is a fluid complexity which must be grasped in its totality. And so it is not surprising either...