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The article discusses the natural habitat of research based on the culture of an anthropologist's sense with emphasis on the application of research on American technology. The ideal of American research has been the disposable truth. Researchers in the universities tend to be ironists and they accept responsibilities under terms which are indistinguishable verbally from the language of the main culture. It is clear that well-supported research of possible use to society will furnish superior instrumentalities of observation.

The article focuses on the relationship between science and metaphysics. During about three centuries of uneasy armistice, science and metaphysics have agreed on a division of the universe according to which science was to have jurisdiction over the outer world of stars and planets and elements and chromosomes while metaphysics retained its authority over the inner world of the human spirit. It is science which has broken the armistice, claiming first the species, then the mind, and at last even the phenomenon of value, thereby provoking a counter-offensive in which metaphysics also has extended its claims from spirit to race and blood in overt defiance of biology and ethnology. Either science must advance and eliminate metaphysics altogether, or none of its past achievements is safe from eventual re-conquest. Either values are natural phenomena and the social sciences are continuous in both subject-matter and methodology with all science, or all science is but the futile floundering of puny mortals temporarily resident in this vale of tears.

This article presents a reply by the author to a criticism on his article Crime and Disease, published in the March 1954 of The British Journal of Sociology. Emotional metaphysics is a charge of the critic's own invention. But presumably the repudiation of this and the insistence that the author's method of thought is surely the opposite of metaphysical are directed against the suggestion that he might have been misled by his metaphysical conviction that there is no such thing as being able to help it, really, to overlook some exceptions to what with delinquents doubtless is the general rule. That he is at least partially convinced can be seen even in his rejoinder: It must indeed be admitted that when we begin to consider the criminal, from the cradle, as the victim of circumstances, man is plunged into a moral dilemma. That this partial conviction sometimes operates as a bias leading to the misrepresentation of the empirical facts cannot so easily be shown. It is surely curious to describe such workaday notions as he acted of his own freewill or he could have helped it as traditional philosophical concepts. Curious too to find something peculiarly abstract about the former notion especially as a complaint against someone saying the meaning of expressions such as of his own free will is and must be given by indicating cases of the sort to which it is preeminently and by ostensive definition applicable. But it is something more than curious to accuse the author of arguing by the absolutes of Determinism and Freewill and employing this traditional dichotomy: and then kindly to paraphrase a too abstruse argument by which author has already demonstrated the inappropriateness of the dichotomy of Determinism versus Free Will to the problem of criminal responsibility.