their continual renovation. Chez nous the fashions change annually-because this is good for the trade of milliners and tailors. They plunge us from one extreme into the opposite, in order that any woman may tell at a glance whether her less fortunate rival is still wearing a dress that was fashioned last year! And they know full well that no self-respecting woman can bear to be out of fashion. Hence their power. Hence the "last cry" of the feminine soul is for the "last novelties" of Paris. Men's fashions do not change so rapidly, because men are more resistant to the suggestions of the herd instinct, and refuse to follow the behests of their tailors, who therefore wisely do not insist on an annual change.

The human appetite for "news seems another objection to the contention that novelty is not beloved. This is a fairly complex craving, but in the main it may be regarded as an adaptation. We must somehow adapt ourselves to a world that engenders novelties. Also life is actually such that nearly

multitude of things men desire but do not possess, they welcome anything new that holds out a prospect of giving them what they want. But of course it should be noted that novelties do not break through in science without a struggle. There is always a conservative party which will not scrap the old and resists innovation, often to the death, and is only vanquished by the perfecting of the new invention and its manifest working, or, in extreme cases, has to be left to die out.

Philosophy has no such motives to welcome novelty. Accordingly it doesn't. The actual history of philosophy exhibits very little of it, in proportion to its length. Hardly half a dozen really new ideas seem ever to have forced their way into its tradition, to infuse fresh blood or to put a new complexion on the mummy cases of its problems. I cannot stop to enumerate them now, but there is no need to wonder at the unprogressiveness of philosophy, which its typical votaries are wont to mistake for an assurance of its eternal truth.

It is clear then that the human attitude towards Novelty is not quite uniform. It varies according to the subject. But our fundamental bias is always hostile, and our concessions to novelty are always extorted. Mostly by the force of fact. For Novelty exists and is all-pervasive. We cannot avoid it, try as we may; but we can deceive ourselves about its existence and disguise our acceptance of it. And so we do! We declare that there is nothing new under the sun." And we prove our dictum true, by never accepting a new truth until it is old and has been licked into shape. So a really new and important truth will bear "discovery" over and over again, for centuries. The first dozen times or so it simply is not comprehended, the next, it is not listened to, because the times are not "ripe" for it. By the time they are, it can always be shown not to be really shocking because not really new at all: and some one can always earn a living by expounding the ancient sages who discovered it long ago and were forgotten for their pains. Thus the Copernican Revolution was nothing new, because it

had been, vainly, urged by Aristarchus of Samos. Darwinism was nothing new, because it was anticipated by Anaximander. Relativity is nothing new, because it is embraced in the great principle of Protagoras, from whom Humanism also may trace its descent. In short, any novelty worth worrying about may be discovered over and over again, like America.

A novelty, therefore, like a parvenu, can always be provided with a pedigree, once it has succeeded. This is very comforting; but it is only part of the social camouflage which blinds us to the occurrence of the new.

III.

To the same system of devices belong at bottom the methodological assumptions by which we render calculable the course of events and construct stable "objects" for the sciences to contemplate. It is traditional to erect these into idols for philosophic worship under such names as "a priori necessities of thought," in order to evade the paradox that the road to scientific truth is paved throughout with postulates and fictions. Scientific novelties also are reached by first pretending that they cannot exist, and then adjusting to the facts the calculations based on this false assumption. Such fictions are everywhere practical necessities, and the philosopher who will not have recourse to them is like a politician who scorns to avail himself of "propaganda." On the enormous extension of this procedure, its indispensability and value, I need not, happily, enlarge; it will suffice to refer to Vaihinger's great study of the Als Ob, and to proceed at once to the task of showing how scientific procedure justifies the human hatred of Novelty.

Scientific procedure, as the more progressive logicians are now recognizing it to be, does (in a sense) rest on a negation of Novelty. It "explains" the new, that is, the object of its inquiry, by taking it as a "case" of the old, whether "law" or "object." It thus refers it to something already known, and assumes that it is "essentially" the same, and may be treated

accordingly. It is plain, however, that in this proceeding its novelty evaporates. It is taken to be irrelevant to its "essence," to be immaterial," if not unreal. In other words, it is abstracted from, even if not denied outright, and it is by this abstraction that the new is triumphantly reduced to the old.

Now what right have we to do this? Certainly none that flows from the duty of correct or complete description. A vital feature of the actual fact is arbitrarily excised and deliberately ignored. Can we rest our claim, then, on a necessity of thought? It is an easy and easy-going habit of ours to bolster up our desires by alleging necessities, the tyrant's plea in philosophy as in politics. But here this plea is manifestly false. For we recognize the existence of Novelty even in the act of abstracting from it: our "case" is plainly a new case of the old. We are intellectually capable, then, of perceiving its actual character; it is untrue that we cannot think novelty.

The real truth is that we do not want to recognize it, and boycott it. Why? Because we do not want to take reality as it comes. We want to control it. We want to alter it. We want to adapt ourselves to it. We want to prepare for it. We want to connect it with our desires and aims. Our cognitive processes, in short, are part and parcel of our vital purposes, and are only intelligible in this connexion. This is why we treat the actual fact in the high-handed way we do.

Now it is easy to see that to manipulate the new, to bend it, eventually, to our will, we must somehow get a hold on it. If it were wholly new, utterly unprecedented and unlike anything we had ever known, this would be impossible; we could not lay hold of it, we could do nothing with it, we could make nothing out of it. We must assume therefore that its nature is not thus intractable. We must explore it for points of likeness to something already known. We must test it by applying to it "laws" (old and approved formulas), and observe whether it will "obey," that is conform to, them. Of course we do not know in advance whether it will; but if it does not, we simply

try another formula, until we discover one that "works": the principle that there must be some way of coping with the new is methodological, and cannot be renounced. The actual hypothesis we use has always to be confirmed empirically by the event; but the principle that inspires our search for a "true" hypothesis is not empirical, but volitional, and drives us, when we have failed, to fresh experiments with other laws, other analogies, hypotheses and similarities. Thus do we grapple with the recalcitrant novelty, until it has been successfully placed in our intellectual cosmos, and we have triumphantly enrolled the intruder in the great army of precedents. Thus is the discrepant novelty tamed and reduced to order and conformity with the cosmic order, which in its turn stands as a pledge to us (of questionable value) that it will not be

intractable.

This then is the reason why it is reasonable for scientific method to abstract from Novelty, in order to tame and humanize it; it is evident that it affords considerable excuse for human repugnance to the new as a disturber of the cosmic order, though hardly a justification for the insaner excesses of our conservatism.

IV.

All this however is not the whole story, but only the conclusion of the first part. For once the new fact has been broken in and tamed and assimilated to the old order, science can, and indeed does, repent it of the violence done to it. It undoes therefore its abstraction from the novel features it had ignored, and proceeds to recognize the individuality of the "case," its differences from the cases previously on record, its unique significance, and the additions it makes to our knowledge. In so doing it revises its statement of the function of "laws." It admits that the "law" it applied was not a rigid instrument of absolute prediction, but a flexible formula to be adjusted to the facts, fitted with blanks that can be accommodated to the