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Radó, Sándor. The Ways of Investigating Nature in the Light of Psychoanalysis.
Boven, William. Alexander the Great.
Winterstein, Alfred. The Origin of Greek Tragedy.
The Ways of Investigating Nature. The author borrows an illustration from the physics of “chance” in the game of tivoli, played upon the Galton board, to show that the principle of causality is not a final basic law upon which research must proceed. The deterministic mechanism of this long accepted law fails in physics and the social field also. Radó points out the existence of a profound difference between the law of causation and a statistic determinism. The former observes an individual process and gives a simple explanation of the entire spatialtemporal course of the phenomenon. In statistic determinism the individual case disappears; the whole number of phenomena are considered empirically, from which the relative frequency of possible results is deduced, the end effect assumed, of course, where certain restricting conditions are fulfilled. The way by which such an effect is produced remains dark. The procedure is based upon reckoning with probability; that is, certain abstract aids are employed, but they are not considered as “causes” or “conditions” in the old sense. Thus some scientists at least are following a new path of investigation without reliance upon the principle of causality as a basic, always valid law.
This new departure meets with opposition, which is to be understood if the grounds of the affective resistance are psychologically examined. Freud has called the older scientific determinism a prejudice. It is as old as Greek thought, but it became a general fundamental principle only after the theological period of the Middle Ages; every effect being considered as proceeding from its cause and similar causes producing similar effects. If one examines this principle, however many forms it has assumed, one finds it has a close relation to the dogma of religious determinism