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Necessity, it has been said, is the mother of invention. It is, I fear, not always so: it is not a condition precedent, as jurists would say. There was no necessity, as far as I know, for the invention, or, rather, the discovery, of the first law of gravitation. If Newton's mind had not been wool-gathering under the apple-tree, the falling of the apple would not, I imagine, have disturbed his equanimity to any appreciable extent. As it was, the apple fell at the right moment, and a train of reasoning was set in motion in Newton's brain. It was a question, not of necessity, but of the coincidence of circumstances. Newton, surely, had seen apples fall many a time before; and, when he was a boy, he must have made many of them fall by the simple process of throwing stones at them. It no more suggested a new world of thought to him then, than the bursting of the lid of a tea-kettle suggested the invention of the steam-engine to many a man before George Stephenson.

No; the point is not that of necessity: it is that of the importance of the moment. There is a time for every thing. Fate's clock must strike: then, and then only, can anything come to fruition. It is not that men's minds were lax before and are extraordinarily keen now; man has changed very little, essentially, during all the uncountable years of his existence in this world. Nobody would say, for instance, that a man of today is more full of brains than Shakespeare and Milton, because he knows only too well many things of which Shakespeare and Milton were utterly ignorant. As the late Laureate, Dr. Robert Bridges, in his Testament of Beauty, says:

"There is now no higher intellect to brighten the world
than little Hellas own'd; nay scarcely here and there
liveth a man among us to rival their seers."

Or, as Messrs. H. G. Wells, and Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells express, in their Science of Life:

"The inventions and organisations that have produced the peculiar opportunities and dangers of the modern world have been the work so far of a few hundred thousand exceptionally clever and enterprising people. The rest of mankind has just been carried along by them, and has remained practically what it was a thousand years ago. Upon an understanding and competent minority, which may not exceed a million or so in all the world, depends the progress and stability of the collective human enterprise at the present time."

It is all a question of circumstance: some may give it the name of necessity, that is all. Of course, some things were invented out of necessity: 鈥�tanks鈥�, for example. But even here we must go right in time and place and not content ourselves with the first ready-made answer that strikes our minds. In these days words have lost their meaning. They are not 鈥榓pparell鈥檇 in celestial light鈥�: we use them much too indiscriminately. If we think deeply, we shall find that necessity is not the mother of invention, nor, for that matter, of anything else. Thunder and lightning there have been ever since the world began; but it is only recently that we have seen the invention of lightning-conductors to houses. I suppose there was necessity for them just as much now as when the first house was built. No one has invented anything by simply taking it into his head to invent that thing: he invented it while conducting experiments in other directions. The question is not one of taking thought. As Wordsworth pertinently asks:

"Think you, 鈥檓id all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?"

Most of the biggest inventions simply came to happen. They were in the nature of "fair, unsought discoveries by the way." We might almost say that they dropped out of the clear sky; why, if history is to be believed, Columbus discovered America by actually setting out to discover India!

There is, no doubt, a fine flavour about the word necessity: "there is magic in the web of it." It acts like a charm. You have only to mention it, and a deep calm at once settles on the troubled waters of society.

"Some to the fascination of a name
Surrender judgment, hoodwink'd."

The truth of the matter is that we have become experts at deceiving ourselves; we are like the man in Scott's Woodstock, who had "attained the pitch of believing himself above ordinances." If a thing suits our minds, forthwith it must be done; and there is always, of course, the excuse of necessity. Indeed, it comes to hand most readily: like Mercutio's wound, "鈥檛is enough, 鈥檛will serve."

Now, what is a necessity? That, surely, without which it is, for the time being, at any rate, impossible to get on. An umbrella is a necessity when you go out in the rain. In this primary sense, doubtless, necessity has a value; though, even here, it is possible to argue that it could be done without. But, generally, the word is used in a much larger and freer sense; its meaning is extended very, very far. Nowadays, to be a graduate is a necessity; to drink coffee (first thing in the morning) is a necessity; bluffing is a very great necessity; turning a blind eye to the things that you do not want to see is a compelling necessity; and, in short, everything is a necessity that you or I want to do, or have done. Necessity is that on which you have stamped your approval; it is that which goes with the mark of your particular mint. The word would not loom so large in the public eye were it not for the prevalence of a peculiar kind of morality. There is a morality that pertains to convention. It has a higher order of merit than the original and authentic brand. It is not enough if a thing is good: it must be good in the eyes of the world. The world is the grand referendum; not God, not Nature, not your own conscience. By the verdict of the world shall you stand or fall. But though convention rules the world and is the merest gloss upon morality, it cannot get on for a single day unless it borrows the alphabet of the real thing; and, therein, though in an indirect way, it pays homage to its original parent. You cannot do the slightest thing without showing sufficient cause. You must go half-way to meet the wishes of the world and to justify your conduct. It is not, however, so terrible as it looks; throw out a feeler or two, enough to see whether it works. Provide an excuse and the world will be satisfied with that excuse: too much is not demanded of you, and you do not demand too much of the world. It is, at the worst, only a kind of formality: that, and nothing more!

We have all, of course, heard of such a thing as "biological necessity." Wars, it has been said, are a biological necessity: they are one of Nature's ways of putting down the superfluous population of the world. That there is often some superfluous population may, if only for argument's sake, be admitted; though the world, I think, is wide enough and large enough for even a more superfluous population. A poor man that has a dozen children does not (out of biological necessity) do away with some of them, just to make room for the others. No doubt, if he killed some of them, the others would have more room. But, generally, this beautiful idea does not strike him, even as an idea. And then, granting that an over-grown population must be annihilated, Nature, I fancy, has other and better ways of annihilating it than by the agency of wars; and Nature often utilises these ways. Within her own bosom Nature has sufficient machinery of destruction: fire and flood, by themselves, are quite enough. It is men that make wars; not Nature. Biology believes in the doctrine of the "survival of the fittest." It must be a curious kind of biological necessity indeed, that slaughters thousands and millions of the best youth of a country, leaving only a few old men and children!

The things of utter necessity are very few indeed; they can almost be counted on one's fingers. Some people have mistaken the promptings of the mind, inspiration, for necessity. In this sense you could say that Luther started his Protestant campaign out of necessity; that Einstein propounded his Theory of Relativity out of necessity; that General Dyer shot at Jallianwala Bagh out of necessity. All this, however, is merely evading the question: it is only going "about it and about."

Let us face the blunt truth. We do things because we like them: we do not do them from any oppressive sense of necessity. We do them first and theorize afterwards: in fact, our theories fit our actions and not our actions our theories, Of course, we have our carefully constructed systems. But we forget that it is we who have evolved the systems, not the systems us, It is we who have created what we call our necessities; there is thus no binding factor about them; we may break through their frame at our will. They have no fixity: they change with the times and with the persons. What is a necessity to you may not be a necessity to me; and, even in regard to the same individual, what was a necessity once may no longer be a necessity now. A necessity is but a creature of the brain; and there is nothing permanent about the workings of the brain. It follows that the whole thing is enveloped in a thick layer of mystery. He that sets about to explain it is in the same predicament as Bardolph:

"Accommodated鈥�; that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being, whereby 鈥榓 may he thought to be accommodated.鈥�"