them to analyse why they hate it and won't, and to insist that, whether they hate it or not, they have got to have it. If I do not suffer the fate of Pentheus, Galileo, or Bruno, before I have sufficiently elucidated these points, I may perhaps persuade one or two that since Novelty is ineluctable and we are all so constructed as to experience it, and the world is continually generating it; it may be more reasonable, or at least more sensible, to try to understand it than to try to ignore it. For the benefit of these few, let me outline the scheme of this paper. My aim will be not so much to dazzle you with paradoxes, to ventilate novelties of detail, or to advocate new solutions for secular problems which have proved impervious to philosophic penetration for the past 3000 years, as to examine Novelty in principle, and to determine the conditions under which it may hope to obtain recognition in a rational conception of reality. I propose to show: I, that Novelty, really and naturally, exists, or rather occurs; II, that hatred of it exists, and is man's normal attitude; III, that this hatred is natural, and in a sense reasonable, but that IV, it should not goad us into denying Novelty. It is better to make the best of it, and of the consequences of recognizing it, in V, Logic, VI, Metaphysics, and VII, Religion. I. The short proof of the existence of Novelty consists of pointing to an obvious, all-pervasive psychical fact which is familiar to every one, and will, I suppose, be equally distasteful to the refined philosophers who feel it an insult to their intelligence to be asked to recognize the reality of a mere fact, and to the sturdy heretics who have found no use for mind in their philosophizing. The former will declare it unintelligible, incredible, and therefore impossible; the latter will decry it as "subjectivism." Still it is a simple psychical fact that our experience never quite repeats itself: in what we call "the same," and are tempted to regard as a recurrence of the same experience, differences may always be detected, if we choose to attend to them. Even if there were no others, the mere fact that an experience had occurred before would make a difference. For the first time it came it was accompanied by a feeling of novelty; when it is repeated, this feeling is lost, and its place is taken by a growing sense of familiarity with infinite gradations of intensity. We know in advance what it will feel like and anticipate it with pleasure or repugnance, hope or apprehension, with interest, indifference, or tedium; thus the very fact that an experience is no longer "new" introduces a new factor. Even if we have more or less forgotten the first experience, it will come back" to us the second time, and whether or not we remember it, there is reason to believe that the course of events will in all cases proceed differently in consequence of the past, and that so nothing is ever wholly forgotten and as though it had never been; indeed there would be no conceivable proof of such total oblivion except just this, that the course of events did repeat itself completely. And this does not appear to be the case. Instead it appears to be an ultimate fact that every mind which apprehends a fact has had a history, and this history makes a difference and affects its apprehension of the fact. What is true of the mind holds moreover, no less, though less manifestly and indisputably, of the rest of reality. Its history too does not repeat itself absolutely, but only with a difference. The flow of reality sets in one direction only, and carries with it its whole past: everywhere the very fact that something has occurred before affects the way "it" happens the next time. This, ultimately, is the reason why the past is irrevocable and the course, even of physical change, is irreversible. It is the reason also why the future is never quite exactly calculable. We may say then that all things are what they have become, and have become what they are, in virtue of what they have been through. Their history is thus always relevant to their 'essence," and until we have ascertained it, we must not take too seriously our definitions of the latter, and the inferences drawn from it. Aristotle made a gallant attempt to bring out this relevance of history to definition in his Tó tɩ ĥv eivaɩ, but his successors have too often failed to see that this clumsy phrase embodied a truth that was lacking to their "eternal" essences. Now practical psychologists have, of course, long been aware of all this. They have known that, to forecast a man's action with any precision, it was vain to appeal to general principles, and necessary to know him, and his past, and if possible that of his ancestors. In these days the other sciences are being forced to similar admissions. The zoologist could never understand the nature and relations of living beings, until he took to working out their history: now he explains the present by the past, and solemnly tells us that we have five fingers because we have retained the primitive pentadactylism of the vertebrate stock! The astronomer nowadays is not content to speculate about a "primitive nebula" out of which our solar system was condensed; he extends and confirms his theory by conceiving it as a special (and very rare) case in the processes of "stellar evolution," and classifies the stars according to the stage in it which they have reached. The geologist is successfully connecting the character of his minerals with their history, and determining their age (and incidentally providing data for that of the earth) by the varying amounts of their " radio-activity.” With the discovery of "isotopes " history has become relevant to chemistry, and chemists are growing chary of predicting how a given sample of a chemical element will behave and of declaring what it is," until they have ascertained its history for a given piece of "lead" may be "thorium-lead" or "uraniumlead," or, more probably, a mixture descended from both these parents," and its "properties" will be affected by its ancestry. Ultimately, it seems likely, that all the "elements" will be found to be mixtures of isotopes. In short, as we probe deeper, all the objects of scientific interest are turning out to be immensely more complicated, individual, nay unique, than any one suspected: the simple, sweeping affirmation of universal "laws," "eternally" prescribed to all things, is being more and more plainly revealed as a convenient postulate of method, which the sciences assumed in the hope of controlling their material, and which encourages them to sustain their struggle with the facts. But actually our laws" are always human inventions and cannot survive without large doses of human fiction. Reality, as we get to know it better, is displaying a character, nay a will, of its own, and a large measure of recalcitrance to our intellectual demands. Of this recalcitrance Novelty is a conspicuous feature, and one that is intimately bound up with the rest. 66 II. Here then is our first reason for hating Novelty. It is a good scientific reason, and proves that the reasons for our hatred are not all disreputable. But of course we have others, still more potent, in which we cannot take such pride. In the first place we are all the creatures of Habit. Habit is the greatest force in nature, and the natural enemy of Novelty. All the stability that can be traced in the flux of reality may be ascribed to it. All the Laws of Nature, in so far as we have hit upon formulas that really hold, and are not fictions of our own invention and subjective conveniences of calculation, are objectively the habits of nature. The stability of these habits is (more or less) an empirical fact, and the sole basis for our predictions and preparations for the course of events. We naturally, therefore, tend to idealize and exaggerate it, and to resent the intrusions of Novelty. Furthermore, the rule of Habit extends to ourselves. We too are made up of habits, and ensconce ourselves in them for safety. Those who are conscious of this fact call themselves "conservatives"; those who are not may imagine themselves "liberals," "radicals," or even "revolutionaries." But they too cannot help being conservative au fond, simply because they too have habits. Fundamentally then human nature is conservative-for good and evil. It engenders a conservative bias, which pervades all social structures and all human institutions, and tips the balance against novelties of (almost) every kind. Novelty is normally painful - psychologically painful because it demands an infraction of habit, an effort, a re-adjustment, thought, doubt, experiment, uncertainty, difficulty, strain, and, possibly, failure. Inertia, laziness, custom, timidity, stupidity, the whole brood of Habit and Ignorance, combine their forces to repulse the new. They always succeed at first, and are never routed without a severe struggle. Of course this is not to assert that all novelties are always detested in every department of life. There are exceptions, or apparent exceptions, notoriously; but they "prove the rule," and their analysis is very instructive. The most striking case, probably, is that of "fashion." The realm of fashion is under the spell of the new. The new is habitually valued as better than the old, and imposed on all who would be "in the fashion." And who would not? For to be "old-fashioned" is to expose oneself to ridicule and contempt. To be arrayed in what "is not worn" is a more heinous solecism than to do what "is not done." At bottom, however, both of these social tabus have a common root in custom, and custom is merely social habit. This prerogative position of Novelty in matters of fashion is not, however, a wholly spontaneous growth. The mutability of fashion is provided for by an elaborate organization which is the product of an advanced civilization. In a primitive society the fashions of dressing one's hair and tattooing one's body do not change. They are tribal habits, and it would bring calamity upon oneself and the whole tribe to innovate upon them in the slightest degree. Why? There does not yet exist a class of specialists whose business it is to change the fashions, and who are interested in |