ABSTRACT
The rosy Baconian promises of the benefits to be derived from knowledge of nature have appeared to be hollow to many a thinker viewing the possible extension of the methods of natural science to the sphere of human conduct. It is a bit of irony that even as the seventeenth century investigators of nature were exercising their newly won freedom as they laid the foundations of modern science, some philosophers of the new science came to view with suspicion the common-sense conviction that human beings are free and responsible, just as soon as they turned their attention to man himself and sought to lay out the ground plan of psychology. For what has recently become evident is that a veritable maze of muddles pervade and surround the familiar accounts offered by classical determinists of just such central and crucial notions as those of action, consequence, motives, circumstances and conditions, intention, reason and the like.
