MALICIOUS PHILOSOPHIES
tain that there are ways essentially different from and superior
to those employed in the natural sciences for ascertaining the con–
ditions for the occurrence of things and events? Or do they dis–
dain science simply because it. does not supply what no knowledge
worthy of the name can offer-an unanalyzed reduplication of
its own subject-matter? In either event, their discontent flows from
a wilful romanticism and a disregard of the historical achieve–
ments of the natural sciences; it provides no valid ground for
excluding the operations of experimental inquiry from the domain
of human affairs.
II
A second widespread cntique of scientific methods is at
bottom a variant of the one already considered. It does not
explicitly
disown the authority of science in human affairs; but
it does recommend the adoption of such vague and irresponsible
canons of experimental control that it in effect argues for the
exclusion of the logical methods employed in the positive sciences
from the study of social problems. This view rests its case on two
major claims; that in the past the natural sciences have mistakenly
tried to "reduce" all features of the world to "mechanical" or
"materialistic" properties; and that recent advances in our knowl–
edge have demonstrated the breakdown of the "mechanical" cate–
gories of classical science. The present view, like the previous one,
maintains that the human scene is so discontinuous
~ith
the "lower
levels" of nature that a common logic of inquiry cannot be ade–
quate to all of them; it therefore concludes that problems affecting
human destiny must be investigated on the basis of canons of
validity and intelligibility which differ radically from those used
in the natural sciences.
Let us examine these contentions. And first, what are we to
understand by the terms "mechanical" and "materialistic"? When
practicing physicists characterize an explanation as "mechanical,"
they mean a theory which, like the one developed by Galileo and
Newton, explains a class of changes
entirely
on ·the basis of the
masses and the spatial and temporal relations of bodies. In this
quite precise sense of the word, Maxwell's electro-magnetic theory
is not a mechanical theory, and with its advent in the 19th century
