412 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 950 



mation touching tlie motion of the ether in 

 the field around a rotating magnet. 



Aethub L. Kimball 

 Amherst College, 

 January 20, 1913 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD 



To THE Editor of Science : Permit me to 

 protest vigorously against the exceedingly 

 narrow conception of scientific method im- 

 plied in Professor MacDougall's discussion of 

 " neo-vitalism " in your issue of January 17. 

 I am not a defender of neo-vitalism, and have 

 no interest in the controversy between the 

 neo-vitalists and their opponents ; but I am 

 interested in keeping the scientific method 

 broad enough to apply to all phases of human 

 experience. It is surely to be deplored that 

 in this age, just when science is expanding 

 to include all human life within its scope, a 

 few scientific men should persist in interpret- 

 ing scientific method in such a way as to 

 limit its application to purely physical phe- 

 nomena. If it is true that " natural science 

 rests finally upon the assumption of mechan- 

 ism [i. e., rigid determination of all processes 

 through the operation of mechanical causes] 

 and excludes all other conceptions," then 

 there can be no scientific treatment of re- 

 ligion, morality or any other phase of the 

 mental and social life of man. Upon this 

 assumption there can only be physical and 

 biological sciences, and we must give up the 

 hope of having mental and social sciences ; for 

 the impossibility of demonstrating mechan- 

 ical causation in the mental and social realms 

 is acknowledged by all careful thinkers and 

 investigators. 



Furthermore, the necessity of science as- 

 suming the universality of, and the rigid 

 determination by, mechanical causation, is 

 not evident, unless science wishes to trans- 

 form itself into a system of monistic philos- 

 ophy. Eather the pragmatic development of 

 science would permit the assumption of one 

 principle of explanation in one realm of phe- 

 nomena where it works, and of another in 

 another realm, where that works; for science 

 is " a prolongation of common sense." Thus 



in the physical sciences no other principle 

 than the mechanistic one is invoked, because 

 mechanical cause and effect will work as a 

 principle of explanation. But in a science 

 like economics, for example, there is little use 

 made of mechanical cause and effect as a prin- 

 ciple of explanation because it will not work. 

 All modern economics, as is well known, is 

 built upon the conception of " value." Now, 

 is economics a science, or not a science? To 

 me the attempt to explain economic phenom- 

 ena through mechanics is as absurd as the 

 attempt to explain biologic phenomena 

 through " entelechy." In either case it is the 

 attempt to explain the known through the less 

 known. The case is exactly similar with all 

 the other social sciences. It may be replied 

 that economics and the other social sciences 

 are " sciences," but not " natural sciences.'' 

 This reply, however, does not meet the issue, 

 because no one can separate the natural sci- 

 ences from other positive sciences unless the 

 word " natural " be defined to mean the phys- 

 ical. 



I am uncertain as to the purpose of Dr. 

 MacDougall's argument, as to whether he 

 wishes to limit greatly the scope of science 

 (as do some philosophers), or to carry through 

 the mechanistic conception as a universal 

 principle of explanation (as do some scien- 

 tists). In either case the argument prac- 

 tically denies the possibility of positive sci- 

 ences of our mental and social life. To many 

 people this is, of course, a welcome conclusion. 

 But the whole development of modern science 

 is against this conclusion. The extension of 

 scientific methods to the mental and social 

 realms of phenomena in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, without any use of mechanistic assump- 

 tions, was accompanied by as substantial tri- 

 umphs in those realms as science has had any- 

 where. Is it not time to acknowledge this? 

 It will not do to say that the assumption in 

 all cases where science has made substantial 

 advances in explaining mental and social phe- 

 nomena has been that of mechanism; on the 

 contrary, the mechanistic assumption, when 

 brought in at all, has been brought in as a 

 metaphysical " guess " which really explained 



