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entirely the result of mechanical causation. 12 But our ordinary experience upon which a physical science is based would say that those wills are free. Here there is a contradiction, both sides of which arising either from ordinary experience generalized, or else from ordinary experience directly, with the result that we are involved in the metaphysical question of freedom. In fact, some mention of the question in books on sociology has very recently come under the writer's observation.
After holding that philosophy is insight and wisdom rather than knowledge and understanding, that philosophy seeks an insight into principles of things, and that its progress is measured by the depth of the insight, Mr. Mackenzie says that scientific investigation is often "too narrow and too wide" to be adequate.
He [the scientist] limits himself to particular aspects of things which are meaningless apart from their relation to the whole, as if its nature were exhausted by the treatment of these particular aspects."
This is in direct line with Mr. Bosanquet's contention that the sociologists who confine themselves to the extreme scientific view of the province and method of investigation have busied them- selves entirely with the lower manifestations of the self, and have entirely neglected its possibilities, and so the field where the desired unity is most likely to be found. Furthermore, this is supported by Hegel's contention that anything, in order to be understood, must be conceived of as being related to its " other." In fact, it is of the very nature of phenomena for them to be relative. In the above contention Mr. Mackenzie has largely pointed out the general defect which applies in particular to the sort of sociology which wants to make the subject entirely positive and exact; the defects of the sociology which thinks its whole function is classification and generalization. Take one of these sociologies, grant them even that they can give a causal explana- tion of societary phenomena without being inconsistent with their postulate of method of procedure, and let us see how far they get. Let us see how far social forces reproduce exactly physical forces. The first glance reveals the fact that social force does not act
11 Vide GIDDINGS, Principles of Sociology, pp. 365, 366.
- Introduction to Social Philosophy, p. 45.
