Sociology, the discipline that deals with the purely social aspects of man (who, of course, can be an object of scientific inquiry in innumerable other respects), is related to the other special sciences of man as geometry is related to the physicochemical sciences. Geometry studies the forms through which any material becomes an empirical body, and these forms as such exist, of course, in abstraction only, precisely like the forms of sociation. Both geometry and sociology leave to other sciences the investigation of the contents realized in the forms, that is, the total phenomena whose forms they explore.

DEFINE: Simmel defines sociology's scope as the study of pure forms of sociation, abstracted from content, analogous to geometry. Builds on: "Sociology studies pure social forms like geometry studies pure spatial forms."

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 200