This fulfillment of individual being with psychologically and historically transmitted substance can lead, to be sure, to a decadent emptiness. It seems as though socially transmitted contents and meanings only attain true value in life if they are balanced to a certain extent by a creative power flowing out of the individual. In the more excellent manifestations of nobility, therefore, it is especially a self-assured personal existence that emerges, a feeling of the equally strong qualities of independence and responsibility of the individual. This is due to the sociologically unique intimacy with which a perduring substance, extending in the three dimensions of past, present, and future, has grown together with the individual's existence, transposing itself into an awareness of the higher values of that existence. Whenever the individual factor is too weak to impart form to that superpersonal substance, then, as stated, signs of decay appear: unavoidably, the substance itself becomes form, and the meaning of life is no more than the preservation of specific status honors and of "good demeanor"—as finally occurred in the nobility of the ancien régime.

XREF: Connects to Simmel's broader sociology of forms vs. life — the tension between crystallized social forms and the individual's creative vitality that recurs throughout his work.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 514