Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [153]
But Philip was argumentatively persistent. ‘But assuming, as the scientists do, that the simplest hypothesis is the best—though I could never for the life of me see what justification, beyond human ineptitude, they had for doing so…’
‘Hear, hear.’
‘What justification?’ repeated Illidge. ‘Only the justification of observed fact, that’s all. It happens to be found experimentally that nature does do things in the simplest way.’
‘Or else,’ said Spandrell, ‘that human beings understand only the simplest explanations. In practice, you couldn’t distinguish between those alternatives.’
‘But if a thing has a simple, natural explanation, it can’t at the same time have a complicated supernatural one.’
‘Why not?’ asked Spandrell. ‘You mayn’t be able to understand or measure the supernatural forces behind the superficially natural ones (whatever the difference between natural and supernatural may be). But that doesn’t prove they’re not there. You’re simply raising your stupidity to the rank of a general law.’
Philip took the opportunity to continue his argument. ‘But assuming, all the same,’ he broke in before Illidge could speak again, ‘that the simpler explanation is likely to be the truer—aren’t the facts more simply explained by saying it’s the individual, with his history and character, who distorts the event into his own likeness? We can see individuals, but we can’t see providence; we have to postulate it. Isn’t it best, if we can do without it, to omit the superfluous postulate?’
‘But is it superfluous?’ said Spandrell. ‘_Can_ you cover the facts without it? I have my doubts. What about the malleable sort of people—and we’re all more or less malleable, we’re all more or less made as well as born? What about the people whose characters aren’t given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type? A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones. After the run has gone on long enough (and it’s astounding the way such runs persist), the character will be formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it’s the individual who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness. But before he had a definite character to distort events into the likeness of—what then? Who decided the sort of things that should happen to him then?’
‘Who decides whether a penny shall come down heads or tails?’ asked Illidge contemptuously.
‘But why bring in pennies?’ Spandrell retorted. ‘Why bring in pennies, when we’re talking about human beings? Consider yourself. Do you feel like a penny when things happen to you?’
‘It doesn’t matter how I feel. Feelings have nothing to do with objective facts.’
‘But sensations have. Science is the rationalization of sense-perceptions. Why should one class of psychological intuitions be credited with scientific value and all others denied it? A direct intuition of providential action is just as likely to be a bit of information about objective facts as a direct intuition of blueness and hardness. And when things happen to one, one doesn’t feel like a penny. One feels that events are significant; that they’ve been arranged. Particularly when they occur in series. Tails a hundred times in succession, shall we say?’
‘Give us the credit of coming down heads,’ said Philip laughing. ‘We’re the intelligentsia, remember.’ Spandrell frowned; he felt the frivolity, as an irrelevance. The subject for him was a serious one. ‘When I think of myself,’ he said, ‘I feel sure that everything that has happened to me was somehow engineered in advance. As a young boy I had a foretaste of what I might have grown up to be, but for events. Something entirely different from this actual Me.’
‘A little angel, what?’ said Illidge.
Spandrell ignored the interruption. ‘But from the time that I was fifteen onwards, things began happening to me which were prophetically like what I am now.’ He was silent.
‘And so you grew a tail and hoofs instead of a halo and a pair of wings. A sad story. Has it ever struck you,