§ 32. (_c_) In considering the use of words in research, one cannot of course overlook the obvious fact that the employment of words is primarily determined by their established meanings, and that these greatly limit our freedom to use them as we please. Words naturally and inevitably suggest their established uses by their mere sounds, and should always be used with a proper respect for their past history and present meaning. To be sensitive to this appeal is the mark of the educated scholar; but it does not require the investigator to exhaust his energies in vain attempts to stereotype absolutely the current meanings, and so to deprive words of their essential function. For their essential function is after all to be instruments for the conveying of actual meaning, and actual meanings are always more or less new (cf. § 12). It occurs to a particular person in a particular situation to express and convey a meaning which has never in its full concreteness occurred before. If the novelty about this situation is appreciable and important, it may well be that the old words will not fully succeed in conveying the new meaning; and yet we shall always endeavour to use them, and select from the accumulated wealth of language the words which will suffice for our purpose. For the alternative is worse; we cannot always be coining new words for every new meaning we may desire to convey; they would not be understood or remembered, and even if they were, a science that employed nothing but technical terms, and was moreover compelled continually to change them, because it would not use them to convey new meanings, would speedily degenerate into an abstruse game, and could make no progress. How impracticable such a policy would be may be gauged by the grave inconvenience which even now systematists cause by so frequently changing the scientific names of plants and animals. It is indispensable, therefore, that words should retain a certain measure of plasticity, in virtue of which they can be transferred from old situations to new and be used to convey new meanings. Nor is there usually any difficulty about thus imposing new duties on the old terms; under the particular circumstances of the situation even wide departures from the established meanings may remain intelligible, and so the progress of science is not impeded.