Historical-psychological processes, in their fluctuations and complexities, can never be completely rationalized. Geometry, by contrast, does have the power to isolate absolutely pure forms out of their material realizations. It should always be remembered that this identity of the kinds of interaction in the face of the simultaneously existing variety of human or objective material (and vice versa) is nothing primarily but a device to make and legitimate the scientific discrimination between form and content in the treatment of empirical phenomena. Methodologically speaking, this discrimination would be required even if the actual constellations did not call for the inductive procedure of crystallizing the like out of the unlike.

DEFINE: Explains that the distinction between form and content in empirical science is a heuristic device for analysis, not a property of the phenomena themselves.

DEFINE: Clarifies the form/content split as an analytical device used to legitimate scientific discrimination, not as a property of the empirical world itself.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 204