X PERSONALITY AS A WHOLE 275 



inheritance may be, yet I am a new person, a new self- 

 consciousness, a personal centre absolutely distinguished 

 from those who gave birth to me and transmitted their 

 qualities to me. The unique whole, called Personality, 

 is not inherited, however much its constituent qualities and 

 elements have been inherited. And the very character of 

 the inheritance implies a new conscious centre to which they 

 belong, a centre which will organise them freely and crea- 

 tively into a new unity. Freedom and plasticity belong not 

 to the experience but to the experiencer. It is the personal 

 self-conscious centre that is free and plastic and creative, 

 just as the artist is free and creative, and not the pigments 

 with which he works. 



This line of reasoning leads to somewhat curious results. 

 It will be asked whether there is then a fresh creation of 

 Personality at each generation; whether human Personality 

 is original and underived in the sense that it is newly created 

 with each human being. On the holistic theory here put 

 forward there seems no denying this " creationism," as it 

 has been called. And it is best to recognise at once that 

 with human Personality we enter a domain of creationism, 

 a domain where, far more than elsewhere in nature, creation 

 is at work. We have called Evolution creative; we have 

 seen how creative newness enters at every stage of the 

 evolutionary advance. As the process advances this crea- 

 tiveness increases and intensifies, until in the origin of the 

 highest known structures, that is to say in human Person- 

 alities, the creativeness rises to a maximum in relation to the 

 inherited materials used in the new structures. Our very 

 conception of Personality is that it is a unique creative 

 novelty in every human being. 



From this it must, however, not be inferred that the 

 phenomenon of Personality should be a most uncertain and 

 wildly fluctuating one; that having no roots in the past and 

 being a creative novelty on each separate occasion, it might 

 be expected to rise and fall with quite incalculable uncer- 

 tainty. Like all the other holistic structures of Evolution, 

 Personality shows a fair average constancy and probably a 



