What we must get away from is “the hell of rigid things.” There is a living life of the people. And it must flow directly through our government and our institutions, expressing itself anew at every moment. We are not fossils petrified in our social strata. _We are alive._ This is the first lesson for us to learn. That very word means change and change, growth and growth. To live gloriously is to change undauntedly—our ideals must evolve from day to day, and it is upon those who can fearlessly embrace the doctrine of “becoming” that the life of the future waits. All is growing; we must recognize this and free the way for the growth. We must unclose our spiritual sources, we must allow no mechanism to come between our spiritual sources and our life. The _élan vital_ must have free play. Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal. We do not want rigid institutions, however good. We need no “body of truth” of any kind, but the will to will, which means the power to make our own government, our own institutions, our own expanding truth. _We progress, not from one institution to another, but from a lesser to a greater will to will._ We know now that there are no immutable goals—there is only a way, a process, by which we shall, like gods, create our own ends at any moment—crystallize just enough to be of use and then flow on again. The flow of life and we the flow: this is the truth. Life is not a matter of desirable objects here and there; the stream flows on and he who waits with his object is left with a corpse. Man is equal to life at every moment, but he must live for _life_ and not for the _things_ life has produced. Yet while it is true that life can never be formalized or formulated, that life is movement, change, onwardness, this does not mean that we must give up the abiding. The unchangeable and the unchanging are both included in the idea of growth.[32] Stability is neither rigidity nor sterility: it is the perpetual power of bringing forth. Writers are always fixing dates for the dividing line between the ancient and the modern world, or between the mediæval and the modern world. Soon the beginning of modern times, of modern thought, will, I believe, be dated at the moment when men began to look at a plastic world, at a life constantly changing, at institutions as only temporary crystallizations of life forces, of right as evolving, of men as becoming. The real work of every man is then to build. The challenge is upon us. This is the task to which all valiant souls must set themselves. We are to rise from one mastery to another. We are to be no longer satisfied with the pace of a merely fortuitous progress. We must know now that we are coworkers with every process of creation, that our function is as important as the power which keeps the stars in their orbits. We are creators here and now. We are not in the anteroom of our real life. This is real life.