Thorstein Veblen

The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays


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authentic knowledge on the other hand. So the body of matter-of-fact knowledge, in modern times, is more and more drawn into the compass of theoretical inquiry; and theoretical inquiry takes on more and more of the animus and method of technological generalisation. But the matter-of-fact elements so drawn in are construed in terms of workmanlike initiative and efficiency, as required by the technological preconceptions of the era of handicraft.

      In this way, it may be conceived, modern science comes into the field under the cloak of technology and gradually encroaches on the domain of authentic theory previously held by other, higher, nobler, more profound, more spiritual, more intangible conceptions and systems of knowledge. In this early phase of modern science its central norm and universal solvent is the concept of workmanlike initiative and efficiency. This is the new organon. Whatever is to be explained must be reduced to this notation and explained in these terms; otherwise the inquiry does not come to rest. But when the requirements of this notation in terms of workmanship have been duly fulfilled the inquiry does come to rest.

      The traditions of the handicraft technology lasted over as a commonplace habit of thought in science long after that technology had ceased to be the decisive element in the industrial situation; while a new technology, with its inculcation of new habits of thought, new preconceptions, gradually made its way among the remnants of the old, altering them, blending with them, and little by little superseding them. The new technological departure, which made its first great epoch in the so-called industrial revolution, in the technological ascendancy of the machine-process, brought a new and characteristic discipline into the cultural situation. The beginnings of the machine-era lie far back, no doubt; but it is only of late, during the past century at the most, that the machine-process can be said to have come into the dominant place in the technological scheme; and it is only later still that its discipline has, even in great part, remodeled the current preconceptions as to the substantial nature of what goes on in the current of phenomena whose changes excite the scientific curiosity. It is only relatively very lately, whether in technological work or in scientific inquiry, that men have fallen into the habit of thinking in terms of process rather than in terms of the workmanlike efficiency of a given cause working to a given effect.

      These machine-made preconceptions of modern science, being habits of thought induced by the machine technology in industry and in daily life, have of course first and most consistently affected the character of those sciences whose subject matter lies nearest to the technological field of the machine-process; and in these material sciences the shifting to the machine-made point of view has been relatively very consistent, giving a highly impersonal interpretation of phenomena in terms of consecutive change, and leaving little of the ancient preconceptions of differential reality or creative causation. In such a science as physics or chemistry, e.g., we are threatened with the disappearance or dissipation of all stable and efficient substances; their place being supplied, or their phenomena being theoretically explained, by appeal to unremitting processes of inconceivably high-pitched consecutive change.

      In the sciences which lie farther afield from the technological domain, and which, therefore, in point of habituation, are remoter from the center of disturbance, the effect of the machine discipline may even yet be scarcely appreciable. In such lore as ethics, e.g., or political theory, or even economics, much of the norms of the régime of handicraft still stands over; and very much of the institutional preconceptions of natural rights, associated with the régime of handicraft in point of genesis, growth and content, is not only still intact in this field of inquiry, but it can scarcely even be claimed that there is ground for serious apprehension of its prospective obsolescence. Indeed, something even more ancient than handicraft and natural rights may be found surviving in good vigor in this "moral" field of inquiry, where tests of authenticity and reality are still sought and found by those who cultivate these lines of inquiry that lie beyond the immediate sweep of the machine's discipline. Even the evolutionary process of cumulative causation as conceived by the adepts of these sciences is infused with a preternatural, beneficent trend; so that "evolution" is conceived to mean amelioration or "improvement." The metaphysics of the machine technology has not yet wholly, perhaps not mainly, superseded the metaphysics of the code of honor in those lines of inquiry that have to do with human initiative and aspiration. Whether such a shifting of the point of view in these sciences shall ever be effected is still an open question. Here there still are spiritual verities which transcend the sweep of consecutive change. That is to say, there are still current habits of thought which definitively predispose their bearers to bring their inquiries to rest on grounds of differential reality and invidious merit.

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      [1] Read before the Kosmos Club, at the University of California, May 4, 1908. Reprinted by permission from the University of California Chronicle, Vol. X, No. 4.