magination, its
unique anxiety for vital intensity, its recognised right to all which
is to be, whence its radical inability to establish a hierarchy of moral
qualifications. Strange reproach! The system in question is not yet
presented to us as a finished system. Its author manifests a plain
desire to classify his problems. And he is certainly right in proceeding
so: there is a time for everything, and on occasion we must learn to be
just an eye focussed upon being. But that does not at all exclude the
possibility of future works, treating in due order of the problem of
human destiny, and perhaps even in the work so far completed we may
descry some attempts to bring this future within ken.

But universal evolution, though creative, is not for all that quixotic
or anarchist. It forms a sequence. It is a becoming with direction,
undoubtedly due, not to the attraction of a clearly preconceived goal,
or the guidance of an outer law, but to the actual tendency of the
original thrust. In spite of the stationary eddies or momentary
backwashes we observe here and there, its stream moves in a definite
direction, ever swelling and broadening. For the spectator who regards
the general sweep of the current, evolution is growth. On the other
hand, he who thinks this growth now ended is under a simple delusion:
"The gates of the future stand wide open." ("Creative Evolution", page
114.) In the stage at present attained man is leading; he marks the
culminating point at which creation continues; in him, life has already
succeeded, at least up to a certain point; from him onwards it advances
with consciousness capable of reflection; is it not for that very reason
responsible for the result? Life, according to the new philosophy, is
a continual creation of what is new: new--be it well understood--in the
sense of growth and progress in relation to what has gone before.
Life, in a word, is mental travel, ascent in a path of growing
spiritualisation. Such at least is the intense desire, and such the
first tendency which launched and still inspires it. But it may faint,
halt, or travel down the hill. This is an undeniable fact; and once
recognised does it not awake in us the presentiment of a directing law
immanent in vital effort, a law doubtless not to be found in any code,
nor yet binding through the stern behest of mechanical necessity, but
a law which finds definition at every moment, and at every moment also
marks a direction of progr