Freedom is variability within a system. I venture to give this definition as a natural extension of a series of discussions dealing with what I call materialistic analysis and insight. Objects and such, as I portrayed them, may be analyzed or comprehended as wholes (insighted). The questions were always lurking in my discussion, however, whether an analysis or an insight must be unique, whether it is sharply determined or not, whether it is fixed or variable, whether there are alternative analyses and insights, and whether in some sense one is “free” to choose his analysis or insight. In suggesting these questions, I was not referring to the possible lack of talent of the thinker, who might have a hopelessly single-track mind, but to the objective limitations set by the object being thought about and the observer doing the thinking. I was referring to an emphatically comprehensive freedom, persistently objective although it embraces a so-called “subject.” This freedom I would call materialistic or concrete freedom, and it is this freedom that I wish to discuss. What I call objective includes many things described—carelessly, I believe—as subjective. For better or for worse, I propose to limit the term subjective in connection with freedom to what would be specifically described as purely subjective. The purely subjective notion of freedom would make it absolute, completely arbitrary, infinitely variable, independent of matter as a pure phenomenon of mind, and empirically unverifiable in the sense of being most private. Such freedom I would be unable to discuss were I rash enough to want to do so. Such freedom is personal and mystical and hence not subject to the finite prison of discussion with its bars of language, its narrow bed of fact and its threat of the strait jacket for the prisoner who imagines words to be what they are not to all others. Otherwise, there is no objection to retaining the term “subjective” for the objective behavior of a “subject.” The blend of such subjective factors (arising in subjects) with factors we habitually call objective (arising in objects) I call materialistic. I have no more affection for the purely objective than for the purely subjective. The blend is the thing.

The Abstract, Contrasted with the Intuitional-Causal Approach. There are two states of sophistication in the attitude which men of science have taken towards theories of natural phenomena. In the more abstract state, the purpose has been to seek the most harmonious scheme of coordination of the phenomena without raising the question of underlying causes and without adherence to some, or any, set of preconceived principles regarded primarily as fundamental starting points. In this state, the starting points have been sought in the phenomena themselves.

Stevens (7 pp. 249-251) has presented a “lusty embryonic” Science of Science, as having arisen out of “operationism as a revolution against absolute and undefinable concepts in physics, behaviorism as a revolution against dualistic mentalism in psychology, and Logical Positivism as a revolution against rational metaphysics in philosophy.”

It would appear that among scientific men discussion of the general principles of natural science (including the problem of causation) has, on the whole, proved more congenial to mathematicians (with their brothers-in-arms the logicians) and physicists than to biologists. Just why this should be so might be difficult to explain or justify. But one reason seems to lie in the comparative ambiguity of the concept of causation in biology. In general, the term causation has been used in science to designate the special rôle of active factors, rather than of passive or stable factors (more or less permanent “conditions”), in the determination of single events. By active factors we mean those which involve physical change, typically associated with transfer of energy; these are distinguished from stable factors or invariants which persist unchanged throughout the process under consideration. Thus in the classical isolated system, the total energy represents a stable factor which remains the same through all transformations of the system. The energy changes its form, potential or distribution, but not its total quantity. This rule of conservation defines a static condition persisting as a limiting factor through any case of change. Similarly, the permanent or unchanging factor in a machine consists in the stable properties and structural interconnections of its parts; together those constitute an invariant which fixes definitely the possible range of activity. Activity itself requires flow of energy; strictly speaking, a causal factor is not a static factor but is a change of some kind; releasing events (“trigger action”) are included under causal events since they introduce factors without which change does not occur.

In the issue of Nature for January 1, 1938, Professor Dingle has given us a remarkably clear and thorough analysis of what the physicist really means, or ought to mean, by the principle that only that which is observable is physically real, or has physical meaning.

The sub-title of this paper is not an apology, but is an “apologia”: the paper is an “essay” in the etymological sense, because, so far as I know, nothing better is possible in the present state of inquiry into the no-man's-land lying between official logic and official linguistics. In trying to write on logico-linguistics for years I have been saved from despair many times by the confession of an eminent mathematician: Professor E. T. Bell, in his little book The Queen of the Sciences, after a particularly difficult passage blurts out: “This sentence is riddled with inconsistencies. It is a fair sample of the difficulties of talking sense about the foundations of reasoning,—mathematical or other.” (P. 136.) The present essay is emphatically concerned with ‘the foundations of reasoning’.

The Trobriand Islanders about whom this study-is concerned, have been studied intensively by Professor Bronislaw Malinowski, who has published his results in several monographs. This essay is based entirely on his writings. It does not add any material to what Professor Malinowski has presented. It tries, rather, to formulate what is not explicitly stated;— the logical and ethical implications of the customary behavior of the Trobrianders. If at times I venture to disagree with Professor Malinowski's own deductions, it is only because, in presenting the material with such a wealth of pertinent detail and emotional association, he has made it possible for his readers to draw conclusions as valid as his own.

The late Victorian novelist George Gissing wrote: “I hate and fear ‘science’ because of my conviction that for a long time to come if not forever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all beauty of the world; I see it restoring barbarism under the mask of civilization; I see it darkening men's minds and hardening their hearts; I see it bringing a time of vast conflicts which will pale into insignicance ‘the thousand wars of old’, and, as likely as not, will whelm all the laborious advances of mankind in blood-drenched chaos”. The German philosopher Schelling protested against “that blind and thoughtless mode of investigating nature which has become generally established since the corruption of philosophy by Bacon and of physics by Boyle and Newton”.