It is interesting to note that some four hundred years [after Ockham] David Hume could write the following on the identity of the self:

When I turn my reflection on myself, I can never perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive anything but the perceptions. It is the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self.

We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions. Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of an oyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive anything but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion.

The annihilation, which some people suppose to follow upon death, and which entirely destroys this self, is nothing but an extinction of all particular perceptions; love and hatred, pain and pleasure, thought and sensation. These, therefore, must be the same with the self; since the one cannot survive the other. (A Treatise of Human Nature, Part IV, Section 6).

It would be easy to say at this point that, when Ockham and Hume had finished their analyses of man, man had lost both his unity and his soul. But, of course, there is more to it than that. Ockham was not just a philosopher, but more radically a theologian and a Christian. And like any Augustinian Christian theologian he was interested in pointing out the inadequacy of human reason when left to itself or when dealing with the empirical situation. The ratio inferior was just that. Unless it was subjected to the ratio superior, enlightened by faith and the Divine Light Itself, there was very little that human reason working by itself could achieve in the way of certain truth. Aristotle was there, and to a certain extent he accepted him. But to pretend that man in his present condition could find salvation and ultimate truth through the teachings of the Stagirite was simply nonsense. What after all were faith and grace meant for, if not to sustain a darkened human intellect and a wayward will, and raise them to the level where man could truly and really understand and consistently pursue the good? In Ockham's eyes Christianity was not just something superadded to an already noble reason. It was rather that without which man could never understand himself, his world, or his God with any degree of certitude whatever. The conclusion is consistently the same: “This we hold only by faith.”

Ockham, then, does not abdicate certitude. He is simply unable to find very much of it on the philosophical level. He is convinced of this, and this conviction is behind all his criticism of Aquinas, Scotus, Henry of Ghent, et al. In the end Ockham is much more an Augustinian than he is a sceptic. He has been called often enough a philosophical sceptic, and from that abstract viewpoint he was. But it is also true that Ockham himself would not welcome such a designation as a total description of his work. He never stopped with a philosophical scepticism. He uses it to point to where man must go, if he is to achieve the certitude he seeks. If an empiricist is unwilling to go beyond his empiricism, then the result, in Ockham's mind, is quite clear. And it seems that historically he has been right. The quotation from Hume represents Hume's total position. It is not Ockham's.

Harry Klocker, William of Ockham and the Divine Freedom.