e of no
use whatever in suggesting either solution or method for the next
situation to arise. It may be comfortably reassuring afterwards, but it
is an empty oracle beforehand.

Sec. 6. If then "logic" is unable to express the nature of our forward
looking interest in the unexperienced and unpredictable, perhaps the
empirical fact will speak for itself. We call things new; we recognize
their novelty and their novelty excites our interest. But just as we are
sometimes told that we can only _know_ the new in terms of its
resemblances to what we have known before, so it may be held that in the
end we can _desire_ it only on the like condition. Are we, then, to
conclude that the seeming novelty of things new is an illusion, or shall
we hold, on the contrary, that novelty need not be explained away and
that a spontaneous constructive interest stands more or less constantly
ready in us to go out to meet it and possess it?

Unquestionably, let us say the latter. Any new commodity will, of
course, resemble in part or in a general way some old one. It is said
that bath-tubs are sometimes used in "model tenements" as coal-bins. Old
uses persist unchanged in the presence of new possibilities. But in
general new possibilities invite interest and effort because our
experimental and constructive bent contrives on the whole to make head
against habituation and routine. We recognize the new as new. And if it
be contended that novelty in its own right cannot be a ground of
interest, that novelty must first get restatement as the old with
certain "accidents" externally adhering, the answer is that the
"accidents" interest us nevertheless. They may prove their right to
stand as the very essence of some new "kind" that one may wish to let
take form and character for him. Instead of the chips and shavings, they
are in fact the raw material of the logical process. For if we can know
the new _as new_, if we can know the "accident" _as accidental_ in a
commodity before us, the fact betrays an incipient interest in the
quality or aspect that its novelty or contingency at least does not
thwart. And is this quite all? Will it be disputed that a _relation_ of
a quality or feature to ourselves which we can know, name, and
recognize--like "novelty"--must be known, as anything else is known,
through an interest of which it is the appropriate terminus?[46]

And there is no difficulty in pointing to instances in which the
character of novelty seems