ABSTRACT
WE have seen throughout this book that for several centuries there has existed a very strong tendency for one form or another of the philosophy of mechanism to be generally adopted among physicists. In Chapters II and III we have described the essentials of this philosophy in some detail, and have given a general outline of how this philosophy has developed in response to the new problems with which physics was faced during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the present chapter we shall criticize this philosophy, demonstrating the weaknesses in its basic assumptions, and then we shall go on to propose a different and broader point of view which we believe to correspond more nearly than does mechanism to the implications of scientific research in a wide range of fields. In addition to presenting this broader point of view in some detail, we shall also show how it permits a more satisfactory resolution of several important problems, scientific as well as philosophical, than is possible within the framework of a mechanistic philosophy.
