There is always one reality and we cannot grasp it scientifically in its immediacy and wholeness but must consider it from a number of different viewpoints and thereby make it into a plurality of mutually independent scientific subject matters. This applies, too, to those psychological phenomena whose contents fail to combine into an autonomous spatial world and which are not strikingly set apart from their psychic reality. Language, for instance, is certainly constructed out of psychological forces and for psychological purposes. But its forms and laws are treated by the science of linguistics with complete neglect of the realization (a realization which alone is given) that this is the object; they are treated exclusively through the presentation and analysis of the construction of the content and the forms that result from it.

DEFINE: Introduces the methodological principle that a single reality must be split into multiple autonomous scientific viewpoints, exemplified by linguistics treating language apart from its psychological origins.

DEFINE: Weber is clarifying that psychological explanation is distinct from explaining the content/configurations that activities aim at, even where psychology is indispensable.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 207