As our theory of the state no longer includes the idea of contractual obligation, we begin to see the interdependence of state and law, that neither is prior to the other. The same process which evolves the state evolves the law. Law flows from our life, therefore it cannot be above it. The source of the binding power of law is not in the consent of the community, but in the fact that it has been produced by the community. This gives us a new conception of law. Some writers talk of social justice as if a definite idea of it existed, and that all we have to do to regenerate society is to direct our efforts towards the realization of this ideal. But the ideal of social justice is itself a collective and a progressive development, that is, it is produced through our associated life and it is produced anew from day to day. We do not want a “perfect” law to regulate the hours of women in industry; we want that kind of life which will make us, all of us, grow the best ideas about the hours of women in industry, about women in industry, about women, about industry. We cannot assume that we possess a body of achieved ideas stamped in some mysterious way with the authority of reason and justice, but even were it true, the reason and justice of the past must give way to the reason and justice of the present. You cannot bottle up wisdom—it won’t keep—but through our associated life it may be distilled afresh at every instant. We are coming now to see indeed that law is a social imperative in the strict psychological sense, that is, that it gets its authority through the power of group life. Wundt says, The development of law is a process of the psychology of peoples, therefore law will forever be a process of becoming.[61] Our obedience to law then must not be obedience to past law, but obedience to that law which we with all the experience of the past at our command, with all the vision of the future which the past has taught us, with all the intelligence which vivid living in the present has developed in us, are able to make for our generation, for our country, for the world. We are told that one of the most salient points in modern juristic thinking is its faith in the efficacy of effort, its belief that law has been and may be made consciously.