are stopped by a rock that is too hard, but which, in one direction at least, prove successful, and break out into the light once more.'[27] But there life does not stop. 'All tended to mankind, But in completed man begins anew A tendency to God.'[28] This creative consciousness still pushes on, giving to matter its own life, and drawing from matter its nutriment and strength. The effort is painful, but in making it we feel that it is precious, more precious perhaps than the particular work it results in, because through it we have been making ourselves, 'raising ourselves above ourselves.' And in this there is the true joy of life--the joy which every creator feels--the joy of achievement and triumph. Thus not only is the self being created, but the world is being made--original and incalculable--not according to a preconceived plan or logical sequence, but by the free spontaneous will of man. The soul is the creative force--the real productive agent of novelty in the world. The strange thing is that the soul creates not the world only, but itself. Whence comes this mystic power? What is the origin of the soul? Bergson does not say. But in one passage he suggests that {120} possibly the world of matter and consciousness have the same origin--the principle of life which is the great prius of all that is and is to be. But Bergson's 'elan vital,' though more satisfactory than the first cause of the naturalist, or the 'great unknown' of the evolutionist, or even than some forms of the absolute, is itself admittedly outside the pale of reason--inexplicable, indefinable, and incalculable.