At the same time, Causal-Determinism has its drawbacks. It is primarily the most artificial and removed from the laws of functioning life. Its efficacy extends to the 'logical' formulation of already existing results, the construction of operating mechanisms, but not fundamentally new discoveries. The first dead end which formalization risks is scholasticism, i.e. pointless albeit logically impeccable reasoning. The second intellectual dead end faced by sequential Determinists is the trap of reductionism, which they fall into on account of fragmenting wholes into their component parts. This deficiency was noted even by the ancient skeptics, as well as in modern times by Hume, who doubted that any event could be dictated by strict reason.
Indeed, in building a long chain of cause and effect, it is difficult to avoid the danger of circularity, the risk of falling into circulus vitiosus—a vicious circle in the proof. Kurt Gödel's theorem on the incompleteness of formal systems, asserts that any sufficiently complex system of rules is either inconsistent, or contains conclusions that can be neither proven nor refuted by the rules of that system. This established limits in the applicability of formal logic.