It will be a good test of this supposed insuperable difficulty to apply the term "creation" to some human act. When Shakespeare composed the tragedy of "Hamlet," he created something in the sense which we are here considering.[61] He created that something out of nothing: for he caused something to exist which did not exist before. He did not merely inscribe certain words upon paper, by the material process of writing, and afterward cause the same words to be repeated by the material process of printing upon another paper. He gave intellectual existence to certain male and female persons of his imagination, carried them through certain periods of their imaginary lives, and made them and their history an imperishable intellectual idea. It is entirely immaterial to the present discussion that such a product of the imagination presents to us nothing but intellectual ideas; that Hamlet and Ophelia, and the King and Queen, and all the rest of the _dramatis personæ_, were mere creatures of the poet's fancy. Although they were nothing but intellectual conceptions, they were "creations" in the sense of being intellectual products that never existed in idea before the poet made them, and therefore they were made out of nothing. Now, although we can not look into the mind of Shakespeare and describe the process by which he formed these creatures of his imagination, we experience no difficulty when we contemplate these imaginary personages, in representing in thought what we mean when we say that he "created" them. It would be simple absurdity to say that he did not create these ideal persons, because the notion of creation implies the formation of something out of nothing. That is the very meaning of creation in its primary and philosophical sense; and, when applied to works of the human imagination, it presents to us an idea that is perfectly capable of representation in thought.