“A PROPHET OF THE SOUL” 
ings, the perception, and the spiritual insight that 
go to the making and the appreciating of a creative 
work are alone equal to the task. 
Resolve all the processes of organic nature into 
their mechanical and chemical elements, and you 
have not got the secret of living bodies any more 
than you have got the secret and meaning of a fine 
painting by resolving it into its original pigments 
and oils, or of a poem by cutting up the words into 
the letters with which it is composed. 
Bergson’s attitude of mind in “Creative Evolu- 
tion” is foreshadowed in a passage in Royce’s 
“Spirit of Modern Philosophy.” Royce is speaking 
of the series of purely physical events which our 
descriptive science shows us in evolution: — 
Look upon all these things descriptively, and you 
shall see nothing but matter moving instant after instant, 
each instant containing in its full description the neces- 
sity of passing over into the next. Nowhere will there 
be, for descriptive science, any genuine novelty or any 
discontinuity admissible. But look at the whole appre- 
ciatively, historically, synthetically, as a musician listens 
to a symphony, as a spectator watches a drama. Now 
you shall seem to have seen, in phenomenal form, a story. 
Passionate interests will have been realized. 
Bergson reads this story of organic evolution in 
the creative and sympathetic way. He does not 
deal with it solely through his equipment as a man 
of science, but primarily through his equipment as a 
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