This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the
older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching
them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that
in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outree
explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for
a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously
till we found something less excentric. The most violent revolutions
in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing.
Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own
biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a
smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so
as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. We hold
a theory true just in proportion to its success in solving this
'problem of maxima and minima.' But success in solving this problem
is eminently a matter of approximation. We say this theory solves it
on the whole more satisfactorily than that theory; but that means
more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize
their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree,
therefore, everything here is plastic.
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