THE AMERICAN
JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Volume XV NOVEMBER, IQOQ Numbers
THE PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY^
PROFESSOR DR. GEORG SIMMEL University of Berlin
If it is true that human knowledge has evolved out of prac- tical necessities, because knowledge of the true is a weapon in the struggle for existence, both as opposed to extra-human exist- ence, and in the competition of human beings with one another — it is at all events long since released from immediate dependence upon this origin. Instead of a mere means to action, knowledge has become an ultimate end (endgiiltiger Zweck). Still, cogni- tion, even in the autonomous form of science, has not everywhere broken off relationships with the interests of practice, although these relationships now appear to be not mere consequences of the practical interest, but reciprocities between two independent realms.^ For scientific cognition does not merely offer itself in technology for realization of external devices, but also, on the other hand, it proposes to itself the problem of theoretical insight into both the internal and external facts of reality. New tend- encies of thought often appear, with the purely abstract character
^ This is a portion of the first chapter in Simmel's Soziologie, a brief notice of which appeared in this Journal, Vol. XIV, p. 544. The translation is as literal as possible. The notes, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. — Albion W. Small.
"An unfortunate way of putting it. If Simmel means only to bring out the fact that modern scholars pride themselves on treating knowledge as an end in itself, the proposition is a commonplace. If he means that the end-in- itself valuation of knowledge is final, or even a complete conception in the sense implied in the following sentence, we enter exception No. i.
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