Life, said William James, is a series of flights and perchings. Action is the process of life, and when its natural tempo or freedom is blocked or thwarted, the costs are those of life. Action is the goal-seeking behavior of the organism. All organisms have “goals”; without them they perish. Goals function as satisfiers of needs; without such satisfaction there is no life. Goal-directed action makes claims upon the organism's environments, and the levies are the stuff of life. Action is (...) commerce with a milieu; “drives”—or any other motivational terms—only suggest the intensity and the form of that exchange; “death” is its cessation. The whole organism is involved, and the involvement is insistent, recurring, cyclical: it is the whole body which acts. (shrink)

The cogency of a scientific study utilizing historical data tends to be, unfortunately, very largely a matter of the methodological presuppositions of the reader. Indeed, the barriers to a more general and thorough scientific use of history are, for the most part, methodological. There are two such barriers: the uncertainty as to the validity of an intensive scientific investigation of historical problems, and the lack of a clear delineation of the fields of research.Concerning the first, two problems must be considered: (...) on the one hand, the nature of historical knowledge and on the other, the nature of scientific knowledge. The predictive assumption of the present discussion is that to understand the essential identity of historical and scientific knowledge is to justify the scientific manipulation of data which are unquestionably historical. The thesis which is being argued here is that all data are historical, that all reality—whatever its level or type—is event-structured, that events have an existential dependence on one another, that therefore relationships of relevance and causation may be established, and that the determination of such relationships is the function of scientific research in any field. (shrink)