PHILOSOPHIC ANTS 201 



sphere, would feel the rhythms of the Black Hamitic 

 Band transmitting Jazz to a million homes, and be 

 able to follow, night by night, the soporific but 

 benevolent fairy-stories of Uncle Archibald. I wonder 

 what they would make of it all. They would at 

 intervals, of course, be bumping into things and people. 

 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 feshion. 



Even the few senses that we do possess are deter- 

 mined 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.' 



