XI FUNCTIONS AND IDEALS 305 



chapter with a brief statement of Freedom and Wholeness or 

 Purity, as illustrated by Personality. The category of Cre- 

 ativeness in its full application to Personality is best illus- 

 trated by the appearance of the great artistic, ethical and 

 spiritual Values or Ideals, which are the creations of Holism 

 on the personal plane. These Values and the higher world 

 of the human spirit which they constitute fall beyond the 

 scope of the present work, which is concerned more with the 

 laying of the foundations of the holistic concept than with 

 the erection of the superstructure. The creative Ideals of 

 Holism in their human aspects, although they give better 

 illustrations of Holism than anything we have discussed in 

 this work, will not be dealt with at this preliminary stage. 

 I therefore proceed to discuss Freedom and Purity in their 

 application to Personality. 



The creative power by which both organism and Person- 

 ality metabolise and assimilate extraneous materials raises 

 the issue of Freedom in an obvious and natural way, and we 

 may briefly resume here what has been said before as to the 

 rival claims of Freedom and Mechanical Necessity in their 

 application to organic and personal wholes. In Chapter 

 VII I have explained in what sense and to what extent the 

 categories of Mechanism and Necessity apply to such wholes. 

 That to a certain extent they are mechanisms falling within 

 the physical laws of Necessity is clear; but only to a certain 

 extent. Beyond that Holism appears as a real active factor 

 in each such whole, controlling and directing its physico- 

 chemical energies towards definite ends. 



The free activity of Holism in the organism and in the 

 personality, considered merely as an organism, does not 

 affect the mechanical chain of natural causation. In an 

 organism the same combination of physical causes produces 

 the same total of physical effects as in any other system. 

 As we saw in Chapter VII, the law of the conservation of 

 energy holds exactly in the same way as in any other natural 

 system. Holism does not break the causal chain; it does 

 not override the laws of physical causation. The laws of 

 physics and chemistry are the same, whether they are studied 



