One of its essential features, so far as we are at present concerned, is his claim that his introduction of a spiritual principle into the life-force, or the creative activity that has expressed itself in the various grades and forms of life, both animal and human, is not a phase of the old philosophy[401] or theology of “final causes” or of a predetermined[402] “teleology.” To this old finalism or teleology[403] the life of organic nature (the “organs” and “cells,” the “instinctive” actions, and the “adjustments” of animals, and so on) were all due to the work of a pre-existing, calculating intelligence operating upon matter; whereas to him they are but different expressions or creations of the life-force that is as little predetermined in organic evolution, as it is in the realm of the activities interpreted for us (in part) by the newer physics and the newer chemistry--in the processes, for example, that are exemplified in the generation of a star out of a nebula. This entire treatment, however, of the notion of purpose in nature is a matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of Bergson, and his own thought (as I shall presently state) is apt to strike us as just as hypothetical as some of the views he attempts to combat. It raises, too, the question of the valuation of his philosophy as a whole, and of its relation to the great thinker who still stands in the very centre of the entire modern movement from Copernicus to Comte and Darwin--Immanuel Kant.[404] We shall best get at the matter of the fuller developments of the philosophy of Bergson that are of interest to us at present, by indicating some of the results that would accrue from it to the constructive philosophy in which we are interested as the outcome of Pragmatism and Idealism. Among these would be, firstly, a new and a fresh, and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the fact of the necessarily abstract and hypothetical[405] character of the analyses to which our world is subjected by the science and by the technic and the supposed “economy” of our present culture.[406] Then an equally new and equally rational (or “rationally grounded”) conviction of the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific categories to the comprehension and the explanation of life and of the life of the spirit. Thirdly, a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the Humanism of the last century have given a more or less one-sided and imperfect formulation. Among such confirmed tendencies are (α) the attempt they have all made to attain to a deeper[407] view of human nature than the view hitherto taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (β) their emphasis upon the freedom and the initiative[408] of the individual and upon the necessity, on the part of philosophy, of a “dynamic” or “motive-awakening”[409] theory of reality, (γ) their insistence[410] similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a _direct contact_ with