It was in reading this text many years ago that I was rescued from the determinist, even mechanistic implications of positivism, a determinism more constraining than either original sin or predestination, the first of these implying to me a realism that profoundly and appropriately complicates the impulse to lay blame, the second entering so far into the mysteries of time and causality that only incomprehension could see it as determinist. There is probably no cruder moral statement possible than to say that people get what they deserve, and this is only truer when rewards or punishments are
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