It has just been said that modern science, simply because it tries to be entirely quantitative, fails to take account of differences between particular facts even in cases where those differences are most accentuated, and such cases are naturally those in which qualitative elements have the greatest predominance over quantitative elements; and it can be said that this is why the greater part of reality eludes it, and why the partial and inferior aspect of truth that it can grasp in spite of all its failings (because total error could have no meaning other than that of pure negation) is reduced to almost nothing. This is more particularly the case when facts within the human order come under consideration, for these are the most qualitative of all those that modern science regards as included in its domain; science is determined nonetheless to treat them exactly like other facts, such as are concerned not only with ‘organized matter’ but even with ‘matter in the raw’, for it has in the end only one method, which it applies uniformly to the most diverse objects, precisely because, by reason of its special point of view, it is incapable of perceiving what are the essential differences between facts. And it is above all in the human order, whether in the field of history or ‘sociology’ or ‘psychology’ or any other kind of study that could be named, that the fallacious character of the ‘statistics’ to which the moderns attach so much importance becomes most apparent; here as elsewhere, statistics really consist only in the counting up of a greater or lesser number of facts that are all supposed to be exactly alike, for if they were not so their addition would be meaningless; and it is evident that the picture thus obtained represents a deformation of the truth, and the less the facts taken into account are alike or really comparable, or the greater is the relative importance and complexity of the qualitative elements involved, the worse is the deformation. Nonetheless, the setting out of figures and calculations gives to the statistician, as it is intended to give to other people, a kind of illusion of ‘exactitude’ that might be called ‘pseudo-mathematical’; but in fact, without its being noticed and because of the strength of preconceived ideas, almost any desired conclusion is drawn indifferently from such figures, so completely without significance are they in themselves. The proof of this is that the same statistics in the hands of several experts, even though they may all be ‘specialists’ in the same line, often give rise, according to the respective theories of the experts, to quite different conclusions, which may even sometimes be diametrically opposed. That being the case, the self-styled ‘exact’ sciences of the moderns, to the extent that they make use of statistics and go so far as to extract from them predictions for the future (relying always on the supposed identicality of the facts taken into account, whether past or future), are really no more than mere ‘conjectural’ sciences, to use an expression freely employed by the promoters of a kind of modern astrology dubbed ‘scientific’; and in employing this term they admit more freely than many other people what their astrology really consists in, for it certainly has only the vaguest and most remote connection, perhaps no more than that of a common terminology, with the true traditional astrology of the ancients, which is today as completely lost as all other knowledge of the same order. This ‘neo-astrology’ does actually make great use of statistics in its efforts to establish itself ‘empirically’ and without attaching itself to any principle, statistics indeed playing a preponderant part in it; and that is the very reason why it is thought right to adorn it with the epithet ‘scientific’, whereby the scientific character of the true astrology is implicitly denied, and this denial is again very significant and very characteristic of the modern mentality.
To assume that facts are identical when they are really only of the same kind, or comparable only in certain respects, while it contributes toward the illusion of an ‘exact’ science, as has already been explained, satisfies at the same time the desire for an excessive simplification, which is also strikingly characteristic of the modern mentality, so much so that this mentality could, without admitting any ironical intention, be qualified as ‘simplistic’ as much in its ‘scientific’ conceptions as in all its other manifestations. These ideas all hang together: the desire for simplification necessarily accompanies the tendency to reduce everything to the quantitative, and it reinforces that tendency, for obviously nothing can be simpler than quantity; if a being or a thing could successfully be shorn of all its distinctive qualities, the ‘residue’ thus obtained would indeed be endowed with a maximum of simplicity: at the limit this extreme simplicity would be such as can only belong to pure quantity, being then the simplicity of the exactly similar ‘units’ that constitute numerical multiplicity—a point important enough to warrant more detailed consideration.
11
Unity and ‘Simplicity’
We have seen that a desire for simplification can become illegitimate or pernicious and that it has become a distinctive feature of the modern mentality; this desire is so strong that certain philosophers have given way to it in the scientific domain, and have gone to the length of presenting it as a sort of logical ‘pseudo-principle’, in the form of a statement that ‘nature always takes the simplest course’. This is a perfectly gratuitous postulate, for there does not seem to be any reason why nature should work in that way and not in any other; many conditions other than simplicity can enter into its workings, and can outweigh simplicity to such an extent that nature seems, at least from our point of view, often to take a course that is extremely complicated. Indeed, this particular ‘pseudo-principle’ amounts to no more than a wish arising from a sort of ‘mental laziness’: it is desired that things should be as simple as possible, because if they really were so they would be so much the easier to understand; and all this is quite in accordance with the very modern and profane conception of a science that must be ‘within the reach of all’, but that is obviously only possible if it is so simple as to be positively ‘infantile’, and if all considerations of a superior or really profound order are rigorously excluded from it.
Even shortly before the beginning of modern times properly so called there can be found something like an early indication of this state of mind in the scholastic adage: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.[38] All is well if the application of this adage is limited to purely hypothetical speculations, but then it becomes of no interest whatever, except within the domain of pure mathematics, for there at least it is legitimate for anyone to confine himself to working on mental constructions without having to relate them to anything else; he can ‘simplify’ then as much as he likes, just because he is concerned only with quantity, for insofar as quantity is considered in itself and by itself, its combinations are not comprised in the effective order of manifestation. On the other hand, as soon as matters of fact need to be taken into account, it is quite another affair, and it becomes impossible not to recognize that ‘nature’ herself seems to go out of her way to multiply beings praeter necessitatem; what kind of logical satisfaction can anyone experience in contemplating, for instance, the multitude and the prodigious variety of the kinds of animals and plants that live around him? Surely this is a long way from the simplicity postulated by those philosophers who want to twist reality to suit the convenience of their own understanding and the understanding of the ‘average’ of their like; and if such is the case in the corporeal world, in itself a very limited domain of existence, how much more must it be the case in the other worlds; must it not indeed then be indefinitely much more so?[39] In order to cut short the discussion of this subject, it is only necessary to recall that, as has been explained elsewhere, everything that is possible is for that reason real in its own order and according to its own mode, and that since universal possibility is necessarily infinite everything that is other than a sheer impossibility has its place therein: what else, then, but this same desire for a misconceived simplification drives philosophers, when evolving their ‘systems’, always to try to set a limit to universal possibility in one way or another?[40]
38
This adage, like another according to which
39
In this connection the scholastic adage of the decadent period could be contrasted with the conceptions of Saint Thomas Aquinas himself concerning the angelic state,
40
That is why Leibnitz said that ‘every system is true in what it affirms and false in what it denies,’ and this means that it contains an amount of truth proportional to the amount of positive reality included in it, and an amount of error corresponding to the reality excluded; it is important to add that it is precisely the negative and limitative side of a ‘system’ that constitutes it as such.