To many an Englishman the human head seems too luxuriant. With its
quantities of superfluous words and ideas, it grows periodically hot
and messy, and needs a thorough cropping and scrubbing. To this end,
William of Occam long ago invented his razor: _entia non multiplicanda
praeter necessitatem_; a maxim calculated to shave the British inner
man clean, and make a roundhead of him, not to say a blockhead. That
everything is "nothing but" something else, probably inferior to it,
became in time a sort of refrain in his politics and philosophy. He
saw that reflection was constantly embroidering on the facts; but did
he suppose that the pattern of things was really simpler than that of
ideas, or did he feel that, however elaborate things might be, thought
at least might be simple? At any rate, he aimed instinctively at
economy of terms, retrenchment in belief, reduction of theory to the
irreducible minimum. If theory was not useful, what was the use of it?
And certainly all that can be said for some theories is that perhaps
they are useful; and when ideas are merely useful, being worthless in
themselves and absorbing human caloric, the less we require of them
the better. Thought might then be merely a means to a life without
thought, and belief a door to a heaven where no beliefs were expected;
all speech might be like the curt words one says to the waiter, in the
hope of presently dining in silence; and all looking might be looking
out, as in crossing a crowded street, ending in the blessed peace of
not having to look any more.
Occam's razor has gradually shorn British and German philosophy of the
notions of substance and cause, matter and God, truth and the soul.
Sometimes these terms were declared to stand for nothing whatever,
because (as in the case of matter and substance) if I reduced myself to
a state of artificial stupidity I might for a moment stop short of the
conception of them. More often (as in the case of the soul) the term
was declared to stand for something real, which, however, was "nothing
but" something else. Of course, all words and thoughts stand for
something else; and the question is only whether we can find another
word or thought that will express the reality better. Thus, if I said
that the soul was "nothing but" a series of sensations, I should soon
have to add that this series, to make up a soul, must arise in the
same animal body, and must be capable of being eventually surveyed and
recalled together; while I should have to assign to some other obscure
agency those unconscious vital functions which were formerly attributed
to the soul in forming and governing the body, and breeding the
passions; functions without which my series of sensations would hardly
be what it is. I am not confident that all this laboured psychology
makes things much clearer in the end, or does not multiply entities
without necessity; since where I had simply spoken of the soul, I
should now have to speak of sensations, series, possibility, synthesis,
personal identity, the transcendental unity of apperception, and the
unconscious mind. Something is doubtless gained by coining these modern
and questionable expressions, since they indicate true complexities in
the facts, while a poetic term like "soul" covers them only by pointing
the finger of childish wonder at them, without analysis. Nature is
far more complicated than any language or philosophy, and the more
these refine, the closer they can fit. The anxiety of the honest Occam
to stick to the facts, and pare his thoughts to the quick, had this
justification in it, that sometimes our images and distinctions are
misplaced. Grammar, usurping the rôle of physics, created metaphysics,
the trouble with which is not at all that it multiplies entities, since
no metaphysician can invent anything that did not lie from all eternity
in the realm of essence, like the plot of unwritten novels, waiting
for some one with wit enough to think of it. The trouble is rather
that the metaphysician probably gives his favourite essences the wrong
status. These beings may well be absent from the time and place to
which he hastily assigns them; they may even be incongruous altogether
with what happens to exist anywhere. What happens to exist is perhaps
what he thinks he is describing, or what, like Occam, he would like to
describe if he could; but he is probably not able. Yet that doesn't
matter so much as he imagines. What happens to exist can take very
good care of itself, and is quite indifferent to what people think of
it; and as for us, if we possess such cursory knowledge of the nearer
parts of existence as is sufficient for our safety, there is no reason
why we should attend to it too minutely: there's metal more attractive
in discourse and in fiction. Mind, as Hobbes said, is fancy, and it is
the things of fancy that greet us first and reward us best. They are
far from being more absurd than the facts. In themselves, all things
are equally unnecessary and equally possible; for their own part, all
are equally ready to be thought of or even to be born. It is only the
routine of nature or the sluggish human imagination that refuses to
admit most of them, as country people refuse to admit that foreign
languages or manners might do as well as their own.
If God or nature had used Occam's razor and had hesitated to multiply
beings without necessity, where should _we_ be? Far from practising
economy, nature is prevented from overflowing into every sort of
flourish and excrescence only by the local paucity of matter, or the
pre-emption of it by other forms; because forms, once embodied in
matter, acquire all its inertia, and grow dreadfully stubborn and
egotistical. Scrimpy philosophers little know whose stewards they
are when they complain of lavishness in nature, or her lordly way
of living; her substance cannot be spent, nor its transformations
exhausted. In sheer play, and without being able to help it, she will
suddenly create organization, or memory, or intelligence, or any of
those little vortices called passions, persons, or nations, which
sustain themselves for a moment, hypostatizing their frail unity into
some moral being--an interest or a soul. And as we are superfluous in
the midst of nature, so is the best part of ourselves superfluous in
us. Poetry, music and pictures, inspired and shaded by human emotion,
are surely better worth having than the inarticulate experience they
spring from. Even in our apprehension of the material world, the best
part is the adaptation of it to our position and faculties, since this
is what introduces boundaries, perspectives, comparison and beauty.
It is only what exists materially that exists without excuse, whereas
what the mind creates has some vital justification, and may serve to
justify the rest. Hence the utility of Occam's razor itself, which may
help us to arrive at a strict and spare account of what the world would
be without us: a somewhat ironical speculation which is the subtlest
product and last luxury of the scientific mind. Meantime the sensuous
and rhetorical trappings of human knowledge, from which exact science
abstracts, by no means disappear; they remain to enrich the sphere of
language and fancy, to which judicious people always felt that they
belonged; and this intellectual or literary realm is no less actual and
interesting than any other, being a part of the moral radiation and
exuberance of a living world.
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