Joan, who had been lying quietly in the shade of the big liveoaks and listening, spoke up.
“Ben, you are a brain surgeon, aren’t you?”
“One of the best,” certified Phil.
“You’ve seen a lot of brains, furthermore you’ve seen ’em while they were alive, which is more than most psychologists have. What do you believe thought is? What do you think makes us tick?”
He grinned at her. “You’ve got me, kid. I don’t pretend to know. It’s not my business; I’m just a tinker.”
She sat up. “Give me a cigaret, Phil. I’ve arrived just where Phil is, but by a different road.
My father wanted me to study law. I soon found out that I was more interested in the principles behind law and I changed over to the School of Philosophy. But philosophy wasn’t the answer.
There really isn’t anything to philosophy. Did you ever eat that cotton-candy they sell at fairs?
Well, philosophy is like that—it looks as if it were really something, and it’s awfully pretty, and it tastes sweet, but when you go to bite it you can’t get your teeth into it, and when you try to swallow, there isn’t anything there. Philosophy is word-chasing, as significant as a puppy chasing its tail.”
“I was about to get my Ph.D. in the School of Philosophy, when I chucked it and came to the science division and started taking courses in psyc hology. I thought that if I was a good little girl and patient, all would be revealed to me. Well, Phil has told us what that leads to. I began to think about studying medicine, or biology. You just gave the show away on that. Maybe it was a mistake to teach women to read and write.”
Ben laughed. “This seems to be experience meeting at the village church; I might as well make my confession. I guess most medical men start out with a desire to know all about man and what makes him tick, but it’s a big field, the final answers are elusive and there is always so much work that needs to be done right now, that we quit worrying about the final problems. I’m as interested as I ever was in knowing what life, and thought, and so forth, really are, but I have to have an attack of insomnia to find time to worry about them. Phil, are you seriously proposing to tackle such things?”
“In a way, yes. I’ve been gathering data on all sorts of phenomena that run contrary to orthodox psychological theory—all the junk that goes under the general name of metapsychics— telepathy, clairvoyance, so-called psychic manifestations, clair-audience, levitation, yoga stuff, stigmata, anything of that sort I can find.”
“Don’t you find that most of that stuff can be explained in an ordinary fashion?”
“Quite a lot of it, sure. Then you can strain orthodox theory all out of shape and ignore the statistical laws of probability to account for most of the rest. Then by attributing anything that is left over to charlatanism, credulity, and self- hypnosis, and refuse to investigate it, you can go peacefully back to sleep.”
“Occam’s razor,” murmured Joan..”Huh?”
“William of Occam’s Razor. It’s a name for a principle in logic; whenever two hypotheses both cover the facts, use the simpler of the two. When a conventional scientist has to strain his orthodox theories all out of shape, ’til they resemble something thought up by Rube Goldberg, to account for unorthodox phenomena, he’s ignoring the principle of Occam’s Razor. It’s simpler to draw up a new hypothesis to cover all the facts than to strain an old one that was never intended to cover the non-conforming data. But scientists are more attached to their theories than they are to their wives and families.”
“My,” said Phil admiringly, “to think that that came out from under a permanent wave.”
“If you’ll hold him, Ben, I’ll beat him with this here thermos jug.”
“I apologize. You’re absolutely right, darling. I decided to forget about theories, to treat these outcast phenomena like any ordinary data, and to see where it landed me.”
“What sort of stuff,” put in Ben, “have you dug up, Phil?”