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an old logical prejudice prevents us from so taking it. It is perfectly possible to conceive this syllogism, as it occurs in real thought, and as alone it can occur therein, as a thoughtexperiment with reality which forecasts the course of events we are entitled to expect on the strength of past experience. But we do not know whether our expectation will be fulfilled. The rightness or wrongness of our anticipation is the news we learn from the event. If our conclusion comes true in actual fact, the reaction on our syllogism is to confirm our belief in its correctness and in the truth of its premisses; if not, we infer that there is some flaw in the premisses. Clearly on this interpretation the premisses must be taken as hypotheses whose truth is not assured; similarly the conclusion, though it ought to come true, and logically must if the premisses hold, need not happen in fact. When therefore it does come about, we learn something new, viz., that our premisses were so far true, and that logical reasoning has availed to predict the actual course of events. Of course this interpretation implies, what nonsyllogistic reasoning openly avows, that reasoning does not start from certainty but from doubt, and reaches not absoluteness but, at best, adequacy to the actual problem considered. It means also that the attempt to abstract from the psychological side of reasoning is wrong in principle, and must be abandoned. And why resent this? For why should it be denied that every thought requires a thinker, and every thinker needs a motive? The need for Novelty then establishes itself even in the interpretation of the Syllogism.*

VI.

Logic, then, not only pronounces a nihil obstat upon the need for Novelty, but in passing it on to Metaphysics associates itself with the demand. Metaphysics however has plenty of

* The ideal of "system" must accommodate itself similarly. For if the system is conceived as "closed" and impervious to novelty, it becomes a fallacious "argument in a circle." Cf. my paper in last year's Proceedings.

prejudices of its own. It has long been accustomed to take it for granted that ultimately Being must be a constant quantity, and relied on the absolute truth and self-evidence of the venerable maxim Ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti. If anything seems to arise or to pass away, this must be an illusion; or else whatever behaves in so inconsiderate and inconceivable a way cannot be truly real. For that which truly is cannot grow less or more. Nor can Being really change in any way. For change is Becoming, and Becoming is unthinkable. It is an impossible union of Being and Not-Being, and Being cannot but be, while Not-Being cannot be at all.

Has not all this a familiar sound? Has it not imposed on us all at some time? Yet it is only a string of methodological principles masquerading as absolute necessities of thought. If we were really resolved to consider the matter dispassionately and without prejudice, should we not soon discover that in itself the bare notion of Being assures us of nothing? We do not know that reality conforms to it. It contains no real guarantee of its own eternity; for the mere fact that something now is (or seems to be) is no proof that it must also have been, and must endure for ever. The validity of the notion of Being is a hypothesis like any other, and its value has to be determined by its application to experience.

Similarly the quantitative constancy of Being cannot be assumed a priori. Abstractly three alternatives would seem to be equally conceivable. Either Being may be constant, or else it may progressively increase, or, again, diminish. The first hypothesis has the methodological advantage of being the simplest and easiest to work with; which is the reason why we always try it first, and cling to it, despite appearances to the contrary. For appearances not infrequently suggest the other alternatives, which intrinsically are quite as plausible, and empirically there is much to be said for them. Thus to all appearance psychic being tends to exemplify a law of increase; it progresses and grows richer, ampler and intenser as it

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accumulates experience-until mental decay sets in. Physical being on the other hand tends for ever to evaporate. subject to a law of decay. The flow of change is ever downwards; mechanical nature seems to be running down like a gigantic clock. This is repugnant to our prejudice, so we insist that the physically real does not really pass away but “ only" passes into an imperceptible form, not into nothingness. But when "matter" is dissolved into "energy" and energy is dissipated" into "heat," they are surely lost to us, and disappear as agents in our world. The explanations given by our physicists of this untoward process seem to be merely ways of concealing this loss, and of saving the face of the postulate of the constancy of Being. A similar self-deception has probably exaggerated the value of the empirical support of this dogma; certainly recent discoveries have done much to discredit its validity. We now know that the ordinary chemical experiments to prove the "indestructibility of matter" were not nearly fine enough. The chemical "atom" is by no means the ultimate and stable structure it was taken to be; wherever we can get to grips with it, we find that it is dissolving or disrupting, more or less slowly. Hence if we realize that the ordinary propositions of physics are statistical results concerning the behaviour of thousands of millions of the constituents of "matter," and are willing to suppose that atoms form an approximately stationary and stable population, there is nothing in the chemical facts to confute the suggestion that atoms, like men, may be generated and destroyed.

The empirical aspect of the world, then, is quite compatible with the falsity of the maxim that nothing arises out of nothing; or rather it seems to hold of some things, or up to a point, and not of others. Of the others some appear to arise out of nothing, and others to pass away into nothingness. These appearances may be illusions, but Metaphysics is hardly entitled to assume this, and the presumptions of a cheap monism should not deter us from investigating them.

Metaphysics should rather consider carefully whether it is not bound to declare that in principle Novelty, wherever it occurs, must necessarily be conceived as arising out of nothing; so that if Novelty is real, origination out of nothing, so far from being an impossible paradox, would be about the commonest and most familiar process in nature. The argument for this contention might be worded thus-It is true that nothing ever arises out of absolutely nothing. There is always something out of which it grows. But that does not explain it wholly. It does not account for the new in it. It is only in so far as it is still the old, or the old over again, that it is accounted for by what it grew out of. In so far as it is new, it remains unaccountable, unpredictable, uncontrolled, undetermined, free. That factor in it, therefore, has arisen out of nothing, and Novelty as such means, Creation out of nothing!

In view of the length of this paper I will abstain from criticizing this argument and remark merely that it may be true. After all we do not always succeed in forcing our postulates upon reality: so after all our world may be such a world as it appears to be, a world in which being is not constant and stable, and time and change are real, and devour what they have engendered.

VII.

I come at length to my last theme, viz., the import of Novelty for Religion, a theme on which I can only throw out a few hints. Religion is perhaps the most paradoxical of human institutions, in which all the contradictions of human nature are embraced and concentrated. For at one and the same time it seems to be morally the embodiment of all man's highest aspirations and the asylum for his maddest and most brutal superstitions, politically the most conservative and most revolutionary of social forces, intellectually the creation of his crudest and his subtlest thought, practically his final effort to transcend the limits of his being and yet the supreme support conditioning

his life within them. Its relation to theology is no less. paradoxical. At first sight theology seems a mere excrescence on religion, devised to amuse the leisure of idle priests; and yet religions all generate theologies, and theologies not infrequently have lessons for philosophy.

So here. We have slowly forced our way to a point where a theological doctrine has all the appearance of a saving revelation. Originally the doctrine of the world's creation out of nothing was bound to seem mere philosophic foolishness. It was a denial of "out of nothing nothing." It had a most discreditable history. It arose out of sectarian zeal, and a blunder of translation. Philo of Alexandria invented it in order to prove that the God of Genesis was superior to the God of the Timaeus. The Platonic "myth" had pictured the latter as forming the (sensible) world out of empty space, and as having as his models the eternal "Ideas": so Philo thought he could go one better by declaring that his God created the world out of nothing. He supported his contention by mistranslating the first chapter of Genesis, which was really a Jewish adaptation of Babylonian myths describing how Bel, the Sun-god, slew Tiamat, the Dragon of the Deep, or Ea, the Fish-god, fished the earth out of the waters of the "Abyss." A correct translation would have brought out the fact that in the Hebrew version also these "waters" were a presupposition of "creation," and that the God of Moses also made the cosmic order out of chaos, and not out of nothing.*

It was a further difficulty about the notion of creation out of nothing that most languages refused to recognize it, and had not evolved the means of expressing it at all. It had not occurred to their makers to distinguish between making or shaping, out of pre-existent material, and "creating" de novo. In French, for example, créer has to do duty for both these ideas. English and German are peculiar in making the

* Cf. C. M. Walsh, The Doctrine of Creation.

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