Page:The Myth of Occams Razor.djvu/7

Rh rerum multiplicioribus invidiam fecerunt, suam vero philosophiam frugalitatis nomine extulerunt. Reales vicissim qui principium illud, mirum entium avaritiam quam tamen natura non amet, in Scholas importasse, simulque; multas interemisse veritates, Nominalibus avaritiam probi loco objecerunt." It is possible that Leibnitz, who was only twenty-four in 1670, may have got the notion of connecting Parcimony (or Logical Frugality) with Nominalism, from some earlier expression of opinion by the elder Thomasius. Some of the very words of Thomasius appear in Morhof's Polyhistor (1688), Tom. II. (1), c. 13, p. 75: which is followed in Brucker's History of Philosophy (1766), Tom. III., p. 904, §27.
 * (5) Still, even then, nobody connected Ockham in particular, with the newly-accepted Scotist-Nominal formula. That connexion may be dated apparently from 1812; when Tennemann in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (§271), wrote of Ockham as following the Rule: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: without expressly ascribing to him the actual use of the very words. They had not been mentioned in his previous larger History (1810), which had quoted "Frustra fit" in a note on page 851 of band viii. Tennemann's loose anachronistic use of the post-mediaeval formula seems to have misled Ueberweg; and had previously caused misunderstanding in Britain. His

Manual had been translated in 1832 by Rev. Arthur Johnson, from the posthumous edition of 1829 as revised by Wendt. Hamilton never noticed the anachronism, though he reviewed Johnson's translation very severely in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1832. He indeed tacitly adopted it in 1853, after inventing the label Occam's Razor. That label was at first (in 1852) applied by him to the Law of Parcimony in general. Hamilton, moreover, seems to have previously devised that very title, Parcimony, in place of the older Frugality. So far as I can find, it first appeared in his edition of Reid's Works (1846), in a note to Reid's First Essay on the Intellectual Powers (chap. iii., p. 236), and in his Supplementary Note A, §2, p. 751.