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PARTISAN REVIEW
the earlier hope that the science of mechanics would become the
universal science of nature was gradually abandoned. But those
who accuse classical science of being "mechanical" are anything
but so definite as to the real point of their charge. For according
to them the
Darwinian theory of organic
evolution
as well as
Maxwell's theory of electro-magnetism are mechanical, although
neither of these theories satisfies the physicist's definition of
"mechanical." The only clear meaning which can be given to the
accusation
is
that classical science is
deterministic--in
the sense
that it attempts to discover the precise conditions for the occurrence
of phenomena, without benefit of final causes and without invoking
experimentally unidentifiable causal agents.
But if this is the meaning of the charge, the claim that modern
science no longer operates with mechanical categories is singularly
ill-founded. As already noted, even classical physics recognized
that mechanical theories (in the technical sense of the word) are
not universally adequate; and recent researches into atomic phe–
nomena have only fortified this conclusion. There is, however,
nothing in modem research which requires the abandonment of the
generic
ideal of classical science: to find the determining condi–
tions for the occurrence of phenomena, expressible in terms capable
of overt empirical control. Thus, even modem quantum-theory–
although it employs technical modes of specifying the character
of physical systems which are different from those used in classical
mechanics-is deterministic or mechanical (in the loose sense) in
so far as it rigorously specifies the unique physical conditions
under which certain types of changes will occur. Similarly, mod–
em genetics is .no less deterministic than the Darwinian theory,
since the former even more completely than the latter has suc–
ceeded in disclosing the mechanisms or structures involved in the
transmission of characteristics from one generation to another.
It
is therefore simply not true that recent advances in knowledge
have demonstrated the untenability of the logical canons of clas–
sical science.
The claim that the world-picture according to natural science
"reduces" everything to blind, undifferentiated collocations of
material particles, and thus fails to do justice to the distinctive
traits of human behavior, likewise rests on a misconception as to
