in so far as it is a guide to combinations and
modifications which are latent in reality. The man who works with his
hands does not create out of nothing a new totality. Even genius is
conditioned by the elements he works with and upon. He can do nothing
with his materials beyond what it is in themselves to yield. This sense
of co-operation is strongly marked in the higher grades of activity. The
world may be in the making, as Bergson says, but it is being made of
possibilities already inherent in it. Life may be incalculable, and you
can never know beforehand what a great man, indeed, what any man may
achieve, but even the originality of a Leonardo or a Beethoven cannot
effect the impossible or contradict the order of nature. The sculptor
feels that the statue is already lying in the marble awaiting only his
creative touch to bring it forth. The metal is alive in the worker's
hands, coaxing him to make of it something beautiful.[11] Purpose does
not come out of an empty mind. Freedom and initiative never begin
entirely _de novo_. Life is a 'creation,' but it is also, as M. Bergson
labours to prove, an 'evolution.' Our ideals are made out of realities.
Our heaven must be shaped out of the materials of our earth.

A moral personality is a self-conscious, self-determining being. But
that is only half the reality. The other half is that it is a
self-determining consciousness _in a world_. As Bergson is careful to
tell us, the shape and extent of self-consciousness are determined by our
relation to a world which acts upon us and upon which we act. Without a
world in which we had personal business we should have no
self-consciousness.

The co-operation of spontaneity and necessity is implied {93} in every
true idea of freedom. If a man were the subject of necessity alone he
would be merely the creature of mechanical causation. If he had the
power of spontaneity only his so-called freedom would be a thing of
caprice. Necessity means simply that man is conditioned by the world in
which he lives. Spontaneity means, not that he can conjure up at a wish
a dream-world of no conditions, but that he is not determined by anything
outside of himself, since the very conditions amid which he is placed may
be transmuted by him into elements of his own character. Moral decisions
are never isolated from ideals and tasks presented by our surroundings.
The self cannot act on any impulse however external till the impulse