The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays — John Shaqi
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
Of the achievements of the classical economists, recent and living, the
science may justly be proud; but they fall short of the evolutionist's
standard of adequacy, not in failing to offer a theory of a process or
of a developmental relation, but through conceiving their theory in
terms alien to the evolutionist's habits of thought. The difference
between the evolutionary and the pre-evolutionary sciences lies not in
the insistence on facts. There was a great and fruitful activity in the
natural sciences in collecting and collating facts before these sciences
took on the character which marks them as evolutionary. Nor does the
difference lie in the absence of efforts to formulate and explain
schemes of process, sequence, growth, and development in the
pre-evolutionary days. Efforts of this kind abounded, in number and
diversity; and many schemes of development, of great subtlety and
beauty, gained a vogue both as theories of organic and inorganic
development and as schemes of the life history of nations and societies.
It will not even hold true that our elders overlooked the presence of
cause and effect in formulating their theories and reducing their data
to a body of knowledge. But the terms which were accepted as the
definitive terms of knowledge were in some degree different in the early
days from what they are now. The terms of thought in which the
investigators of some two or three generations back definitively
formulated their knowledge of facts, in their last analyses, were
different in kind from the terms in which the modern evolutionist is
content to formulate his results. The analysis does not run back to the
same ground, or appeal to the same standard of finality or adequacy, in
the one case as in the other.
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