When we begin trying to quit our anthropocentry and discover what the world might be like if only we had other organs of body and mind for its assaying, we must flounder and bump in a not dissimilar fashion.
Even the few senses that we do possess are determined by our environment. Sweet things are pleasant to us: sugar is sweet: so is “sugar of lead”--lead acetate; sugar is nutritious, lead acetate a poison. The biologist will conclude, and with perfect reason, that if sugar was as rare as lead acetate in nature, lead acetate as common as sugar, we should then abominate and reject sweet things as emphatically as we now do filth or acids or over-hot liquids.
But I must pause, and find a moral for my tale; for all will agree that a moral has been so long out of fashion that it is now fast becoming fashionable again.
Every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say, knows William of Occam’s Razor--that philosophical tool of admirable properties:--“Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”
We want another razor--a Relativist Razor; and with that we will carry out barbering operations worthy of another Shaving of Shagpat: we will shave the Absolute.
The hoary Absolute, enormous and venerable, grey-bearded and grey-locked--he sits enthroned, wielding tremendous power, filling young minds with fear and awe.
Up, barbers, and at him! Heat the water of your enthusiasm: lather those disguising appurtenances. See the tufts collapse into the white foam--feel the hairy jungles melt away before your steel! And at the end, when the last hair falls, you will wipe away the lather, and look upon that face and see--ah, what indeed?
I will not be so banal as to attempt to describe that sight in detail. You will have seen it already in your mind’s eye: “or else” (to quote Mr. Belloc)--“or else you will not; I cannot be positive which.” If not, you never will; if yes, what need to waste more of the compositor’s time? But of him who forges that razor, who arms those barbers, who gives them courage for their colossal task, of him shall a new Lucretius sing.
Belloc, H. “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.”
---- ---- “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”
Wheeler, W. M. “Ants” (Columbia University Series).
[41] Read before the Heretics Club, Cambridge, May 1922.