The problem of the reality and nature of novelty in the universe has long engaged the attention of philosophers. “There is nothing new under the sun” is one ancient weighty utterance. On the other hand, “you cannot step twice into the same river”, said Heraclitus, for in the interval between your first and second steps, the river has changed and you have changed. One recent attempt to analyze this problem and other affiliated problems, is the theory of emergence.

The meaning of emergence has been interpreted in a multitude of ways. What is it that emerges in turn from all this ado about emergence?

It is regrettable that the only distinctive overtone that seems to come forth is a lurking sense of mystery or mystification about unexpected or unforseen or “new” forms of organizations. This sense of mystery is conveyed most strongly by those who credit the alleged newness to some sort of subtle influence determined to make new things out of the old. Likewise it is also strongly suggested by those who pretend merely to stumble upon it as an “empirical” find,—but, oh, what a fantastic find!

In attempting to clarify the problem of personality integration the writer gained the impression that the difficulty of such a task does does not lie alone in the paucity of usable factual data but it is due, even to a greater extent, to the inadequacy of our logical tools. Such a handicap is felt not only in the study of personality, but in the study of wholes in general. Here the attempt will be made to develop some concepts which may be useful for the understanding of the structure of wholes.

We are accustomed to think and to speak of the physical universe as having objective existence, externally to ourselves; and as being in objective existence quite apart from any question of our perception of it. Even the idealistic philosopher regards the universe so, except when he is reflecting mentally upon other possibilities. The realistic view is the primary view. Idealism is an afterthought. And the idealist, if he is an investigator in physical science, cannot avoid acting upon the postulate of realism. Nothing else gives him a foothold for work. He has to regard the universe “as if” it were real. All our philosophies are necessarily based upon postulate; all our science is founded upon faith.

General philosophy claims to be the critical subject which lays down for all of us what we may be allowed to think, and yet it has played no part whatever in the great revolutions of human thought of the present century—those connected with relativity and the quantum theory. It might have been expected that the scientists would have been constantly consulting the philosophers as to the legitimacy of their various speculations, but nothing of the kind has happened. Since no one can dispense with some sort of meta-physic, each scientist has made one for himself, and no doubt they contain many crudities, but it would seem that a deep interest in metaphysic is a disadvantage rather than an advantage to the physicist—at least I have the impression that those of my friends who are most inclined to speculate on the ultimate things appear to be the ones whose scientific work is most hampered by doing so. Now I propose to risk a similar indiscretion. I want to embody in it the practical philosophy of a physicist, and I do not mean it as an attack on the pure philosophers, who are very reasonable people, only chargeable with the minor offence of not having made me want to read their books!

The present paper is concerned chiefly with the problem of scientific prediction. It aims at a factual analysis of the processes leading to prediction, and ventures an appraisal, in the light of this analysis, of some modern and unconventional theories of probability and truth. But although prediction is here chosen as the central issue of discussion, I do not wish to imply that, in its usual sense, it is the only or even the dominant issue of scientific research.

If the history of civilization is to be an instrument for the advancement of civilization, historians must break new paths toward a wider and deeper understanding of human affairs. Despite the achievements of those who have explored the influence of technics, the power of nationalism, the rôle of mass-psychology, the economic factors in political and social life, our analyses of history are from a scientific standpoint still all too primitive. As John Dewey has said, “It is possible to study a multitude of histories, and yet permit history, the record of the transitions and transformations of human activities, to escape us. Taking history in separate doses of this country and that, we take it as a succession of isolated finalities, each one in due season giving way to another, as supernumeraries succeed one another in a march across the stage. We thus miss the fact of history and also its lesson; the diversity of institutional forms and customs which the same human nature may produce and employ.“