refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the
invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is
not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been
thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who
volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough
for a full day's work. The most they can ever accomplish in the
way of genuine originality is an occasional brilliant spurt, and half a
dozen such spurts, particularly if they come close together and show
a certain co-ordination, are enough to make a practitioner
celebrated, and even immortal. Nature, indeed, conspires against all
such genuine originality, and I have no doubt that God is against it
on His heavenly throne, as His vicars and partisans unquestionably
are on this earth. The dead hand pushes all of us into intellectual
cages; there is in all of us a strange tendency to yield and have done.
Thus the impertinent colleague of Aristotle is doubly beset, first by a
public opinion that regards his enterprise as subversive and in bad
taste, and secondly by an inner weakness that limits his capacity for
it, and especially his capacity to throw off the prejudices and
superstitions of his race, culture anytime. The cell, said Haeckel,
does not act, it reacts--and what is the instrument of reflection and
speculation save a congeries of cells? At the moment of the
contemporary metaphysician's loftiest flight, when he is most
gratefully warmed by the feeling that he is far above all the ordinary
airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is
suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is
simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced
into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was
made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of
fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched
upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the man of