[45]
OCCAM'S RAZOR
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.
[46]
EMPIRICISM
Experience is a fine word, but what does it mean? It seems to carry with it a mixed sense of mastery and disappointment, suggesting knowledge of a sort with despair of better knowledge. Is it such contact with events as nobody can avoid, shocks and pressure endured from circumstances and from the routine of the world? But a cricket-ball has no experience, although it comes in contact with many hands, receives hard knocks, and plays its part in the vicissitudes of a protracted game. There are men in much the same case; they travel, they undergo an illness or a conversion, and after a little everything in them is exactly as it was before; ράθος with them is not ράθος; their natures are so faithful to the a priori and so elastic that they rebound from the evidence of sense and the buffets of fortune like a rubber bag full of wind; they pass through life with round eyes open, and a perpetual instinctive babble, and yet in the moral sense of the word they have no experience, not being mindful enough to acquire any. It would seem that to gather anything we must first pause, and that before we can have experience we must have minds.
Yet if we said that experience arose by the operation of mind, would not all the operations of mind be equally experience? Has not a maniac probably more and more vivid experience than a man of the world? Doubtless when people call their fancies or thoughts experience, they mean to imply that they have an external source, as "religious experience" is assumed to manifest divine intervention, and "psychical experience" to prove the self-existence of departed spirits. But these assumptions are not empirical; and evidently the religious or psychical experience itself, whatever its cause, is the only empirical fact in the case. Those who appeal to the lessons of experience are not empiricists, for these are lessons that only reason can learn. Experience, as practical people understand it, is not every sort of consciousness or memory, but only such as is addressed to the facts of nature and controlled by the influence of those facts; material contact or derivation is essential to it. Experience is both physical and mental, the intellectual fruit of a material intercourse. It presupposes animal bodies in contact with things, and it presupposes intelligent minds in those bodies, keeping count of the shocks received, understanding their causes, and expecting their recurrence as it will actually take place. To these naturalistic convictions all those ought to have clung who valued experience as a witness rather than as a sensation; without animals in a natural environment experience, as contrasted with fancy or intuition, can neither be nor be conceived. It means so much of knowledge and readiness as is fetched from contact with events by a teachable and intelligent creature; it is a fund of wisdom gathered by living in familiar intercourse with things.