ABSTRACT
The difficulty with abandoning the historical dimension of Newtonianism's reported contribution to the American constitution by rejecting one set of influences in favour of another is that the same problem of establishing causality and verification is merely being repeated rather than being resolved. It would appear that the folly lies in assigning responsibility for the adoption of balanced government to any one set of circumstances, or to any one era, or to any single reason whatsoever. To adopt such a unidimensional interpretation is tantamount to assuming that it is possible, among other things (1) to unravel the complexities of historical cause and effect; (2) to differentiate active forces from incidental developments, from unrelated yet parallel phenomena, and from diffuse and ambiguous associations; (3) to separate description from prescription; (4) to distinguish clear and positive causative factors from the symmetry of ex post facto rationalizations; (5) to determine the real significance both of explicit and declared values and beliefs, and of implicit and assumed values and beliefs; (6) to discern the point at which prior ideas and preceding experience can be differentiated from active ideas and immediate experience; and (7) to know the precise relationship between ideas and experience, i.e. to be able to answer ‘the great basic question of all philosophy… that concerning the relationship of thinking and being’. 1
