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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Every month some one pronounces that science must be rejected if we are to preserve a belief in human freedom, or that only by a faith in freedom that flies in the face of logic and the principle of causality can democracy be justified. Equally often other authors insist that the increase of knowledge in the science of human behavior makes plain the irrelevance and sentimentality of pious talk about free and rational choice. What is the source of this dispute? Why is no resolution of it arrived at?
1 An earlier version of this paper was read to the Philosophical Society of the University of Minnesota, October 6, 1955.
2 Pierre Simon de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, (translated by Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory) New York, 1951, p. 4.
3 William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism” in A Will To Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York, 1896. pp. 160–161. Other references to this essay are indicated in the text by citing page numbers.
4 John Stuart Mill, System of Logic. (Eighth Edition) New York, 1881. pp. 581–582.
5 William James, A Pluralistic Universe. New York, 1909, p. 79.
