In which Alinardo seems to give valuable information, and William reveals his method of arriving at a probable truth through a series of unquestionable errors.
Later William descended from the scriptorium in good humor. While we were waiting for suppertime, we came upon Alinardo in the cloister. Remembering his request, I had procured some chickpeas the day before in the kitchen, and I offered them to him. He thanked me, stuffing them into his toothless, drooling mouth. “You see, boy?” he said. “The other corpse also lay where the book announced it would be…. Now wait for the fourth trumpet!”
I asked him why he thought the key to the sequence of crimes lay in the book of Revelation. He looked at me, amazed: “The book of John offers the key to everything!” And he added, with a grimace of bitterness, “I knew it, I’ve been saying as much for a long time…. I was the one, you know, to suggest to the abbot … the one we had then … to collect as many commentaries on the Apocalypse as possible. I was to have become librarian…. But then the other one managed to have himself sent to Silos, where he found the finest manuscripts, and he came back with splendid booty…. Oh, he knew where to look; he also spoke the language of the infidels…. And so the library was given into his keeping, and not mine. But God punished him, and sent him into the realm of darkness before his time. Ha ha…” He laughed in a nasty way, that old man who until then, lost in the serenity of his old age, had seemed to me like an innocent child.
“Who was the monk you were speaking of?” William asked.
He looked at us, stunned. “Whom was I speaking of? I cannot remember … it was such a long time ago. But God punishes, God nullifies, God dims even memories. Many acts of pride were committed in the library. Especially after it fell into the hands of foreigners. God punishes still….”
We could get no more out of him, and we left him to his calm, embittered delirium. William declared himself very interested in that exchange: “Alinardo is a man to listen to; each time he speaks he says something interesting.”
“What did he say this time?”
“Adso,” William said, “solving a mystery is not the same as deducing from first principles. Nor does it amount simply to collecting a number of particular data from which to infer a general law. It means, rather, facing one or two or three particular data apparently with nothing in common, and trying to imagine whether they could represent so many instances of a general law you don’t yet know, and which perhaps has never been pronounced. To be sure, if you know, as the philosopher says, that man, the horse, and the mule are all without bile and are all long-lived, you can venture the principle that animals without bile live a long time. But take the case of animals with horns. Why do they have horns? Suddenly you realize that all animals with horns are without teeth in the upper jaw. This would be a fine discovery, if you did not also realize that, alas, there are animals without teeth in the upper jaw who, however, do not have horns: the camel, to name one. And finally you realize that all animals without teeth in the upper jaw have four stomachs. Well, then, you can suppose that one who cannot chew well must need four stomachs to digest food better. But what about the horns? You then try to imagine a material cause for horns—say, the lack of teeth provides the animal with an excess of osseous matter that must emerge somewhere else. But is that sufficient explanation? No, because the camel has no upper teeth, has four stomachs, but does not have horns. And you must also imagine a final cause. The osseous matter emerges in horns only in animals without other means of defense. But the camel has a very tough hide and doesn’t need horns. So the law could be…”
“But what have horns to do with anything?” I asked impatiently. “And why are you concerned with animals having horns?”
“I have never concerned myself with them, but the Bishop of Lincoln was greatly interested in them, pursuing an idea of Aristotle. Honestly, I don’t know whether his conclusions are the right ones, nor have I ever checked to see where the camel’s teeth are or how many stomachs he has. I was trying to tell you that the search for explicative laws in natural facts proceeds in a tortuous fashion. In the face of some inexplicable facts you must try to imagine many general laws, whose connection with your facts escapes you. Then suddenly, in the unexpected connection of a result, a specific situation, and one of those laws, you perceive a line of reasoning that seems more convincing than the others. You try applying it to all similar cases, to use it for making predictions, and you discover that your intuition was right. But until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit. And this is what I am doing now. I line up so many disjointed elements and I venture some hypotheses. I have to venture many, and many of them are so absurd that I would be ashamed to tell them to you. You see, in the case of the horse Brunellus, when I saw the clues I guessed many complementary and contradictory hypotheses: it could be a runaway horse, it could be that the abbot had ridden down the slope on that fine horse, it could be that one horse, Brunellus, had left the tracks in the snow and another horse, Favellus, the day before, the traces of mane in the bush, and the branches could have been broken by some men. I didn’t know which hypothesis was right until I saw the cellarer and the servants anxiously searching. Then I understood that the Brunellus hypothesis was the only right one, and I tried to prove it true, addressing the monks as I did. I won, but I might also have lost. The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn’t know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn’t know that a few seconds before winning I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose. Now, for the events of the abbey I have many fine hypotheses, but there is no evident fact that allows me to say which is best. So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now. Let me think no more, until tomorrow at least.”
I understood at that moment my master’s method of reasoning, and it seemed to me quite alien to that of the philosopher, who reasons by first principles, so that his intellect almost assumes the ways of the divine intellect. I understood that, when he didn’t have an answer, William proposed many to himself, very different one from another. I remained puzzled.
“But then…” I ventured to remark, “you are still far from the solution….”
“I am very close to one,” William said, “but I don’t know which.”
“Therefore you don’t have a single answer to your questions?”
“Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris.”
“In Paris do they always have the true answer?”
“Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.”
“And you,” I said with childish impertinence, “never commit errors?”
“Often,” he answered. “But instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.”
I had the impression that William was not at all interested in the truth, which is nothing but the adjustment between the thing and the intellect. On the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were possible.
At that moment, I confess, I despaired of my master and caught myself thinking, “Good thing the inquisitor has come.” I was on the side of that thirst for truth that inspired Bernard Gui.
And in this culpable mood, more torn than Judas on the night of Holy Thursday, I went with William into the refectory to eat my supper.