Among Aryan peoples, the earliest ties of the individual to a super-individual order of life seem to be rooted in a very general instinct or concept of the normative, the decent, the Ought in general. The Hindu dharma, the Greek themis, the Latin fas, all express this undifferentiated "normative as such/' The more special regulations, religious, moral, conventional, legal, are still enfolded in it, are not yet ramified and separated out: the general notion of the normative is their original unity, not a unity abstracted from them in retrospect. In contrast with the opinion according to which morality, custom, and law have developed as supplementations out of this germinal state, it seems to me that this germinal state is perpetuated in what we call custom.

DEFINE: Explains dharma, themis, fas as cognate expressions of an undifferentiated 'normative as such' — an original unity rather than a retrospective abstraction.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simm…, loc. 3236