Stagnant waters become noisome after a while. And stagnant values? Certainly within these eternal pools not a few repulsive things have been born: in Perfection, Sin; in Justice, Guilt. It was when human judgments were apotheosized and became Eternal Justice that guilt was insinuated into the core of Life. A falsehood, a presumption! What man found necessary at one moment in his history for his preservation, that, forsooth, was a law governing the spheres, the everlasting edict of God Himself. And when Life did not operate in conformity with this law, it was Life that must needs be guilty--a very ingenious method of world-vilification! It was human vanity that created the eternal verities. And how much have we suffered from them! For the deification of Things meant the diabolization of Man, nay, of Life itself. The metaphysician who created Heaven created Hell at the self-same moment; but, ever since, it has been Hell that has given birth to the metaphysicians. Being _condemns_ Becoming, and pollutes all Life with sin. So in the pools of Being we can no longer cleanse ourselves, and our preference for a doctrine of Becoming may be at bottom a hygienic preference. 159 _The God of Becoming_ Love is the God of Becoming. All the other gods are static gods, changeless for yesterday, today and tomorrow. But Love belongs altogether to the future. It is the deity of those who would create a future. 160 _Utopias_ It is sympathy that has built the Utopias. On every one of them is written, "Conflict and suffering are bad." Utopia is nothing but a place where men are happy, like how many heavens, an ideal of exhaustion. The thing that is omitted from it is always Love, for Love would shatter all Utopias and leave them behind. In Nowhere Man no longer creates, but enjoys. But creation and pain go hand in hand; for what is creation? The dissolution of the outworn, the birth of the new; a continuous fury in which the throes of death and of life are mingled. And Love calls Man to that fate. What we need is an ideal of energy. But that must needs be an ideal of Man, not of Society; for Man is the dynamic, Society the static. Utopia is a goal, but the Superman is a goal beyond a goal; for, once attained, he is naught but the arrow to shoot into _his_ future. To attain the Superman is to surpass the Superman. Only ideals of this kind are unassailable by Love. 161 _"Primacy of Things"_ If we aim at a state of society in which static values, as far as we can know them, are conformed with, we aim at a state in which the creative impulse will not only be needless, but harmful. For does not belief in absolute values necessarily imply belief in a Utopia? And therefore in something antagonistic to Love? The metaphor of static Perfection, lovely as it is, has perhaps ruled us too long, and it is time we superseded it by another. Or is it still, as it has always been, a crime to substitute one metaphor for another? Even if it is Love that drives us on?