guard against any mistake as to the position which it holds in the mental
economy. Many writers and teachers insist on will-power as though that were
the creative faculty. No doubt intense will-power can evolve certain
external results, but like all other methods of compulsion it lacks the
permanency of natural growth. The appearances, forms, and conditions
produced by mere intensity of will-power will only hang together so long as
the compelling force continues; but let it be exhausted or withdrawn, and
the elements thus forced into unnatural combination will at once fly back
to their proper affinities; the form created by compulsion never had the
germ of vitality _in itself_ and is therefore dissipated as soon as the
external energy which supported it is withdrawn. The mistake is in
attributing the creative power to the will, or perhaps I should say in
attributing the creative power to ourselves at all. The truth is that man
never creates anything. His function is, not to create, but to combine and
distribute that which is already in being, and what we call our creations
are new combinations of already existing material, whether mental or
corporeal. This is amply demonstrated in the physical sciences. No one
speaks of creating energy, but only of transforming one form of energy into
another; and if we realize this as a universal principle, we shall see that
on the mental plane as well as on the physical we never create energy but
only provide the conditions by which the energy already existing in one
mode can exhibit itself in another: therefore what, relatively to man, we
call his creative power, is that receptive attitude of expectancy which, so
to say, makes a mould into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated
substance can flow and take the desired form. The will has much the same
place in our mental machinery that the tool-holder has in a power-lathe: it
is not the power, but it keeps the mental faculties in that position
relatively to the power which enables it to do the desired work. If, using
the word in its widest sense, we may say that the imagination is the
creative function, we may call the will the centralizing principle. Its