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 outr 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 eccentric. 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 ones 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. But success in solving this problem is eminently a matter of approximation. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic. Thus, I hope this archive corner to become a corner in which our thoughts move forward cohesively in the end. The pragmatist in us should always prevail in the end over our own personal grudges that we could as easily hold over individuals with whom we might have had discussions of unflattering kind.