That the roots of this speculative scheme of “creative evolution” should reach so far into the background of human culture and draw on sources so close to the undisciplined prime-movers of human nature is, of course, in no degree derogatory to this system of theory; nor does it raise any presumption of unsoundness in the tenets that so are, in the course of elaboration, built up out of this metaphysical postulate. In point of fact, the characterisation here offered places M. Bergson’s thesis, and therefore his system, precisely where he has been at pains to explain that he wishes to take his initial position in advocating his view,--at an even break with the mechanistic conception; the merits of which, as contrasted with his own thesis, will then be made to appear in the course of the further argument that is to decide between their rival claims to primacy. In point of formal and provisional legitimation, such an imputation of workmanlike efficacy at large rests on ground precisely even with that on which the mechanistic conception also rests,--viz. imputation by force of metaphysical necessity, that is to say by force of an instinctive impulse. The main theorem of causation, as well as its several mechanistic corollaries, are, in the last resort, putative traits of matter only, not facts of observation; and the like is true--in M. Bergson’s argument admittedly so--of the _élan de la vie_ as well. So far, therefore, as regards the formally determinable antecedent probability of the two rival conceptions, the one is as good as the other; but M. Bergson’s argument, running on ground of circumstantial evidence in the main, makes out at least a cogently attractive likelihood that the conception for which he speaks is to be accepted as the more fundamental, underlying the mechanistic conception, conditioning it and on occasion overruling its findings in matters that lie beyond its ascertained competence. Which would come, in a different phrasing, to saying that the imputation of creatively workmanlike efficiency rests on instinctive ground more indefeasibly intrinsic to human nature; presumably in virtue of its embodying the functioning of an instinctive proclivity less sophisticated and narrowed by special habituation, such special habituation, e. g., as that exercised by the technology of handicraft and the machine process in recent times.