20 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL Later, when these independent structures have taken form, the search for truth is for the sake of truth in science, for the sake of beauty in art, and for the sake of God in religion. An objective cultural world now exists whose structure confronts life as a fixed station on its onward march.! Life as process, continuous and essentially dynamic, creates the non-temporal forms, discrete and essentially static. These forms, once created, confront life, obstruct its free, unhampered flow, and try to shape it according to their norms. Out of this tension life’s eternal dialectic is born. The processes of life create forms and embody themselves in structures. The forms of life, although the product of its processes, yet limit and define them. But life eternally transcends its self-created forms in order to find embodiment in new and better forms. These succes- sive discrete forms direct and modify the ceaseless flow of life until, no longer capable of giving it adequate expres- sion, they are superseded in turn by other forms. This is the eternal dialectic inherent in life itself. For life is not only a continuous process and, as such, relative in relation to these forms and structures; it is also, as process, at the same time creator of these forms and therefore more than either. It is that which is more than continuity and form, that which continually transcends itself and its creations. Its unitary function is its self-transcendence. Life is the final unitary synthesis which is the absolute of its own rel- ativities.? i Lebensanschauung, pp. 38-39, 50-56, 58-61. 2 For a more complete development of Simmel’s metaphysics of life, see his Lebensanschauung (Vier metaphysische Kapitel). In the above paragraphs Simmel’s relativistic philosophy has been briefly sutlined. His philosophy is a method, not a system. Yet, even so, it is not wholly unsystematic. It has a fundamental principle and a method, or rather its