The same spontaneous vital activity of which Guyau makes a central doctrine characterises Bergson’s view of reality. He upholds, like Boutroux, freedom and contingency, but he will not admit finalism in any shape or form, not even a teleology which is created in the process of development. He refuses to admit as true of the universal process in nature and in human history what is certainly true of human life—the fact that we create ends as we go on living. For Bergson there is no end in the universe, unless it be that of spontaneity of life such as Guyau had maintained. There is no guarantee of progress, no law of development, but endless possibility of progress. Such a view, as we have already insisted, is not pessimistic. It is, however, a warning to facile optimism to realise that humanity, being free, may go “dead wrong.” While Boutroux maintains with Ravaisson that there is at the heart of things a tendency to superior values such as beauty, goodness and truth, and while Renan assures us that the balance of goodness in the world is a guarantee of its ultimate triumph, Bergson, like Renouvier, gives us stern warning that there is no guarantee in the nature of things that humanity should not set its heart on other values, on materialistic and egoistic conceptions, and go down in ruin quarrelling and fighting for these things. There is no power, he reminds us, keeping humanity right and in the line of desirable progress. All is change, but that is not to say that all changes are desirable or progressive. Here we arrive at a point far removed from the rosy optimism of the earlier thinkers. Progress as a comfortable doctrine, confidently accepted and dogmatically asserted, no longer holds ground; it is seen to be quite untenable.