The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other EssaysVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
Veblen, Thorstein
Economics; Science
Scholarship--that is to say an intimate and systematic familiarity with
past cultural achievements--still holds its place in the scheme of
learning, in spite of the unadvised efforts of the short-sighted to
blend it with the work of science, for it affords play for the ancient
genial propensities that ruled men's quest of knowledge before the
coming of science or of the outspoken pragmatic barbarism. Its place may
not be so large in proportion to the entire field of learning as it was
before the scientific era got fully under way. But there is no intrinsic
antagonism between science and scholarship, as there is between
pragmatic training and scientific inquiry. Modern scholarship shares
with modern science the quality of not being pragmatic in its aim. Like
science it has no ulterior end. It may be difficult here and there to
draw the line between science and scholarship, and it may even more be
unnecessary to draw such a line; yet while the two ranges of discipline
belong together in many ways, and while there are many points of contact
and sympathy between the two; while the two together make up the modern
scheme of learning; yet there is no need of confounding the one with the
other, nor can the one do the work of the other. The scheme of learning
has changed in such manner as to give science the more commanding place,
but the scholar's domain has not thereby been invaded, nor has it
suffered contraction at the hands of science, whatever may be said of
the weak-kneed abnegation of some whose place, if they have one, is in
the field of scholarship rather than of science.
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