THE PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY 311
could never have been constructed. Without the intermediate operation of innumerable syntheses, in particular less extensive, to which the following researches are to be in large part devoted, there would be only innumerable discontinuous systems. That which makes scientific determination of such obscure social forms difficult is the very thing which makes them immeasurably im- portant for the deeper understanding of society: that as a rule they are not stereotyped in rigid superindividual structures, but that they exhibit society as it were stattis nascens. This is not to assert that we have to do, under the categories here in mind, with the absolutely primordial, historically unsearchable beginnings; but with that which occurs every day and hour. Socialization between persons incessantly takes place and ceases, an eternal flowing and pulsing, which links the individuals together even where it does not go as far as real organizations. Thus we have to do in this connection with the microscopic-molecular occurrences, so to speak, within the human material, which occurrences, how- ever, are the actual occurring (Geschehen) which concatenates or hypostatizes itself as the macrocosmic permanent unities and systems. That people gaze at one another and are jealous of one another; that they exchange letters or dine together; that, apart from all tangible interests, they affect one another sympathetically or antipathetically ; that gratitude gives to the altruistic act an after effect which is an inseparable bond of union ; that one asks another to point out the way, and that people dress and adorn themselves for one another's benefit — all the thousand relation- ships playing from person to person, momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, transitory or rich in consequences, from which these illustrations are quite casually chosen, bind us in- cessantly together. At each moment threads are spun, dropped, taken up again, displaced by others, with still others interwoven. In this connection we have to do with those reciprocities between the atoms of society which only psychological microscopy can make out, those reciprocities which carry the whole tenacity and elasticity, the whole color (Buntheit) and sameness {Einheitlich- keit) of this so obvious and so mysterious life. The desideratum is to apply the principle of the endlessly numerous and endlessly
