The truth of spontaneity and initiative in life has lately found in M. Bergson a fresh and vigorous advocacy, and we cannot be too grateful to that profound thinker for his reassertion of some neglected aspects of freedom and his philosophical vindication of the doctrine which puts it in a new position of prominence and security. 'Life is Creation.' 'Reality is a perpetual growth, a Creation pursued without end.' 'Our will performs this miracle.' 'Every human work in which there is invention, every movement that manifests spontaneity brings something new into the world. In the composition of the work of genius, as in a simple free decision, we create what no mere assemblage of materials could have given.'[9] But yet he says that 'life cannot create absolutely because it is confronted with matter. . . . But it seizes upon this matter which is necessity itself, and strives to introduce into it the greatest possible amount of indetermination and liberty.'[10] Even Bergson, though he emphasises so strongly immediacy and incalculableness in {92} all human action, cannot deny that the bodily arrangements and mechanisms are at least the basis of the working of the soul. Man cannot produce any change in the world except in strict co-ordination with the forces and qualities of material things. The idea in his consciousness is powerless save in so far as it is a guide to combinations and modifications which are latent in reality. The man who works with his hands does not create out of nothing a new totality. Even genius is conditioned by the elements he works with and upon. He can do nothing with his materials beyond what it is in themselves to yield. This sense of co-operation is strongly marked in the higher grades of activity. The world may be in the making, as Bergson says, but it is being made of possibilities already inherent in it. Life may be incalculable, and you can never know beforehand what a great man, indeed, what any man may achieve, but even the originality of a Leonardo or a Beethoven cannot effect the impossible or contradict the order of nature. The sculptor feels that the statue is already lying in the marble awaiting only his creative touch to bring it forth. The metal is alive in the worker's hands, coaxing him to make of it something beautiful.[11] Purpose does not come out of an empty mind. Freedom and initiative never begin entirely _de novo_. Life is a 'creation,' but it is also, as M. Bergson labours to prove, an 'evolution.' Our ideals are made out of realities. Our heaven must be shaped out of the materials of our earth.