PHILOSOPHIC ANTS 201 



and be able to follow, night by night, the soporific but 

 benevolent fairy-stories of Uncle Archibald. I won- 

 der what they would make of it all. They would at 

 intervals, of course, be bumping into things and peo- 

 ple. But would touch and radio-sense alone make 

 our world intelligible? I wonder. . . . 



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 fash- 

 ion. 



Even the few senses that we do possess are deter- 

 mined by our environment. Sweet things are pleas- 

 ant 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 per- 

 fect 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 emphat- 

 ically 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 



