§ 19. Not only is this much easier to do than to make the discovery, but it is very much easier to follow. Any one can see the connexion once the data have been arranged in logical order. Hence the assumption that this order somehow represents the actual process in a perfected form is natural enough. But it leads to contempt for the procedure of discovery. The discovery is made to look so easy that it becomes impossible to appreciate its difficulty and its merit, and it seems astonishing that no one made it long before. For did not the ‘facts’ all but force it upon the dullest mind? Who could have failed to see that fossils must be (at least) as old as the rocks in which they are embedded, that obviously worked flints, similarly, attest the antiquity of man, that northern Europe is scratched all over with the marks of a gigantic glaciation? It is forgotten that these ‘facts’ were _not_ there until there came a mind prepared to notice them. Hence none of these discoveries were in fact easy to make, and they were preceded by a long struggle of the human mind with false preconceptions and the illusory ‘facts’ which they had engendered. Nor are discoveries easy to get recognized when they have been made. The persecutions to which discoverers of new truth are subjected always and everywhere (more or less) form as discreditable a chapter of human history as the persecution of moral reformers. Those may count themselves fortunate who are simply ignored. Hence everything has to be ‘discovered’ over and over again. Nothing new ever enters the world, just as nothing old ever passes away, without infinite pains and after a protracted struggle. One curious result of this inertia which deserves to rank among the great fundamental ‘laws’ of nature, is that when a discovery has finally won tardy recognition, it is usually found to have been anticipated, often with cogent reasons and in great detail. Darwinism, e.g., may be traced back through the ages to Heraclitus and Anaximander. Thus it is true that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’; but only because when a new truth first appears it does not prevail: when after a hundred repetitions it is at length recognized, it is no longer strictly _new_. Accordingly, the ‘discovery’ of a truth is only the beginning of its career, the first step by which it makes its way in the world, and still very distant from the crowning ‘proof’ with which logic complacently adorns it _ex post facto_, when it has ‘arrived’. The slowness and difficulty, then, with which the human race makes discoveries, and its blindness to the most obvious facts, if it happens to be unprepared or unwilling to see them, should suffice to show that there is something gravely wrong about the logician’s account of discovery.