ABSTRACT
Propositions about necessary connection must be capable of demonstration; the belief in necessary connection is meaningless. When people come to consider propositions about freedom or causation, any question of demonstration is wholly irrelevant. There is a difficulty, however, which concerns propositions about freedom which results from the alleged doctrine that the denials of meaningless propositions are themselves meaningless. Degrees of freedom refers to the inheritance of causal influence from prior events. If people wish to know more than the formal nature of occurrences, they must turn their attention from physics to that immediate knowledge derived from the experience they have when they will and act. There are two things which metaphysics asks of the natural sciences. That the abstractions used by the natural sciences be capable of being derived from actual experience; and that the conclusions of science have meanings in terms of such experience. Judgments of probability are made on the basis of evidence present to the judging individual.
