V. - DISCUSSION
THE MYTH OF OCCAM'S RAZOR.
1. From the middle of the Nineteenth Century, nearly every modern book on Logic has contained the words: Entia non sunt multiplicanda, præter necessitatem: quoted as if they were the words of William of Ockham. But nobody gives a particular reference to any work of the Singular and Invincible Doctor: sometimes also, as on the title-page of his De Sacramento Altaris (1513), described as the Venerabilis Inceptor (of "Terminism" ?). We turn in vain even to Sir William Hamilton, facile princeps (among English writers) in philosophical learning; or to his nearest rival, his disciple Dean Mansel. And my own fruitless inquisition for the formula, in those works of Ockham which have been printed, has led me to disbelieve that he ever used it to express his Critique of Entities.
2. This disbelief is further justified by what I find, and cannot find, in laborious recent histories of Medieval philosophy. Haureau (in his Philosophie Scholastique, vol. ii, chap. xxviii., pp. 438, 443, 446): Erdmann (in his History of Philosophy, vol. i., §216); and De Wulf (in his Medieval Philosophy, §368); all concur in giving another set of words, as those usually employed by Ockham: "Pluralitas non est ponenda (or Non est ponenda pluralitas) sine necessitate". They do not even mention the common form of the Novaculum Nominalium. Nor does Prantl, in his large collection of citations (Geschichte der Logik, iii., pp. 327-420); though one of them (Note 758) contains: "Nunquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate". Nor does Stockl, in his very full Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, §§259-266, pp. 986-1021 in the second volume. He selects: "Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora": as distinctive of Ockham in this connexion. So did the earlier historian Tenneman: Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 851 in band viii. (1810). In England this phrase even became a legal maxim: as we may see in Wingate's Maxims of Reason (1658), no. 177. And it was judicially applied by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere[1] in 1610 and 1612. But it seems likely that Ockham's most famous phrase in his own day was the: "Sufficiunt singularia, et ita tales res universalia omnino frustra ponitur": from which
- ↑ Coke's Reports: I., 8, 167 (Earl of Cumberland's case): and I., 9 (Sir G. Reynal's case). See also Coke's Institutes, Part I. (on Littleton) for the application of this maxim to feudal tenure.
