We see this in our daily life where we do not finish our thought, construct our will, and then begin our actualizing. Not only the actualizing goes on at the same time, but its reactions help us to shape our thought, to energize our will. We have to digest our social experience, but we have to have social experience before we can digest it. We must learn and build and learn again through the building, or we must build and learn and build again through the learning. We sit around the council table not blank pages but made up of all our past experiences. Then we evolve a so-called common will, then we take it into the concrete world to see if it will work. In so far as it does work, it proves itself; in so far as it does not, it generates the necessary idea to make it “common.” Then again we test and so on and so on. In our work always new and necessary modifications arise which again in actualizing _themselves_, again modify themselves. This is the process of the generation of the common will. First it appears as an ideal, secondly it works itself out in the material sphere of life, thereby generating itself in a new form and so on forever and ever. All is a-making. This is the process of creating the absolute or Good Will. To elevate General Welfare into our divinity makes a golden calf of it, erects it as something external to ourselves with an absolute nature of its own, whereas it is the ever new adjusting of ever new relatings to one another. The common will never finds perfection but is always seeking it. Progress is an infinite advance towards the infinitely receding goal of infinite perfection. How important this principle is will appear later when we apply these ideas to politics. Democratic ideals will never advance unless we are given the opportunity of constantly embodying them in action, which action will react on our ideals. Thought and will go out into the concrete world in order to generate their own complete form. This gives us both the principle and the method of democracy. A democratic community is one in which the common will is being gradually created by the civic activity of its citizens. The test of democracy is the fulness with which this is being done. The practical thought for our political life is that the collective will exists only through its self-actualizing and self-creating in new and larger and more perfectly adjusted forms. Thus the unity of the social process becomes clear to us. We now gain a conception of “right,” of purpose, of loyalty to that purpose, not as particularistic ideas but as arising within the process. RIGHT We are evolving now a system of ethics which has three conceptions in regard to right, conscience and duty which are different from much of our former ethical teaching: (1) we do not follow right, we create right, (2) there is no private conscience, (3) my duty is never to “others” but to the whole.