These forms are frameworks for the creative life which, however, soon transcends them. They should also house the imitative life, for which, in the final analysis, there is no space left. They acquire fixed identities, a logic and lawfulness of their own; this new rigidity inevitably places them at a distance from the spiritual dynamic which created them and which makes them independent.

XREF: The life-versus-form tension echoes Bergson's élan vital and later process philosophers like Whitehead; also resonates with the concept of "frozen music" applied to architecture.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 837