L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 265 
contrast with the former, is best indicated by the term creative. The 
point I have tried to make is that in any sane view of human life as 
a whole the creative must be regarded as at least as significant and 
important as the conservative activities. 
Having travelled so far one must perforce go farther. Purely 
conservative and purely creative activities, if indeed they exist, are 
only limiting instances; in most, if not in all activities, the two 
characters are interfused. For example, the motive of pure science is 
unmistakably creative, yet its extrinsic conservative value is unlimited ; 
on the other hand, the vast industrial organisations of to-day exemplify 
activities which, though conservative in their genesis, yet have developed 
the creative character in an impressive degree. Considerations of this 
kind prepare one to see that the higher creative life, far from being 
merely a splendid accident, is really the clearest and purest expression 
of the essential character of life at all its levels. The poets are, as 
the Greeks called them, the supreme makers, for all making has in it 
something of the stuff of poetry. In short, there is no life, however 
humdrum, however crabbed by routine, which is not permeated by 
the self-same element whose inflorescence is literature, art, science, 
philosophy, religion. 
The argument might rest here, but I am constrained to carry it 
still farther. I find it difficult to believe that what is true of human 
life in its conscious aspect is not in some sense true of life as a whole. 
Competent observers, for instance Professor Garstang, hold that in 
the animal world there is something strictly comparable with esthetic 
creation, but I have in view an idea of wider scope. It is the idea 
developed with whimsical seriousness by Samuel Butler, namely, that 
the variations or mutations which in one form or another every theory 
of evolution postulates, are in essence acts of creation homologous 
with human inventions and works of art—that if, for example, we com- 
pare the emergence or modification of an animal organ, say, with the 
creation of Hamlet or the invention of the petrol-engine, the differences 
between the two things, vast as they may be, have yet less significance 
than the fundamental resemblances. This view, which is implicit in 
some of the older philosophies, is central in the speculations of 
M. Bergson; it is congruent with the ideas of several modern thinkers 
who are hardly to be called Bergsonians; and I think it is beginning to 
invade orthodox biology. It is certainly incompatible with the mechan- 
istic theory of life, but nevertheless leaves room for all that the up- 
holders of the theory are entitled, and (I venture to think) are really 
concerned to claim. That the life of an organism can be analysed 
exhaustively into physical and chemical factors is a proposition which 
it would be extremely rash to dispute; but it is, I think, plainly untrue 
that the behaviour of the organism as an integrated unit remains within 
the categories of physical science. Here I take my stand with Pro- 
fessor Alexander and Professor Lloyd Morgan, holding that life is 
not the mere sum of the physico-chemical reactions that occur in an 
organism but a constitutive quality of the complex of those reactions— 
a quality not ‘epiphenomenal,’ but substantial in the sense that it 
makes a difference to what Professor Stout has called the executive 
