Thorstein Veblen
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN MODERN CIVILIZATION 

American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 5. (March, 1906), pp. 585-609.
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It is commonly held that modern Christendom is superior to any and all 
other systems of civilized life. Other ages and other cultural regions are 
by contrast spoken of as lower, or more archaic, or less mature. The claim 
is that the modern culture is superior on the whole, not that it is the 
best or highest in all respects and at every point. It has, in fact, not an 
all-around superiority, but a superiority within a closely limited range of 
intellectual activities, while outside this range many other civilizations 
surpass that of the modern occidental peoples. But the peculiar excellence 
of the modern culture is of such a nature as to give it a decisive 
practical advantage over all other cultural schemes that have gone before 
or that have come into competition with it. It has proved itself fit to 
survive in a struggle for existence as against those civilizations which 
differ from it in respect of its distinctive traits.
Modern civilization is peculiarly matter-of-fact. It contains many elements 
that are not of this character, but these other elements do not belong 
exclusively or characteristically to it. The modern civilized peoples are 
in a peculiar degree capable of an impersonal, dispassionate insight into 
the material facts with which mankind has to deal. The apex of cultural 
growth is at this point. Compared with this trait the rest of what is com-
[586]prised in the cultural scheme is adventitious, or at the best it is a 
by-product of this hard-headed apprehension of facts. This quality may be a 
matter of habit or of racial endowment, or it may be an outcome of both; 
but whatever be the explanation of its prevalence, the immediate 
consequence is much the same for the growth of civilization. A civilization 
which is dominated by this matter-of-fact insight must prevail against any 
cultural scheme that lacks this element. This characteristic of western 
civilization comes to a head in modern science, and it finds its highest 
material expression in the technology of the machine industry. In these 
things modern culture is creative and self-sufficient; and these being 
given, the rest of what may seem characteristic in western civilization 
follows by easy consequence. The cultural structure clusters about this 
body of matter-of-fact knowledge as its substantial core. Whatever is not 
consonant with these opaque creations of science is an intrusive feature in 
the modern scheme, borrowed or standing over from the barbarian past.
Other ages and other peoples excel in other things and are known by other 
virtues. In creative art, as well as in critical taste, the faltering 
talent of Christendom can at the best follow the lead of the ancient Greeks 
and the Japanese. In deft workmanship the handicraftsmen of the middle 
Orient, as well as of the Far East, stand on a level securely above the 
highest European achievement, old or new. In myth-making, folklore, and 
occult symbolism many of the lower barbarians have achieved things beyond 
what the latter-day priests and poets know how to propose. In metaphysical 
insight and dialectical versatility many orientals, as well as the 
Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, easily surpass the highest reaches of the New 
Thought and the Higher Criticism. In a shrewd sense of the religious 
verities, as well as in an unsparing faith in devout observances, the 
people of India or Thibet, or even the mediaeval Christians, are past-
masters in comparison even with the select of the faith of modern times. In 
political finesse, as well as in unreasoning, brute loyalty, more than one 
of the ancient peoples give evidence of a capacity to which no modern 
civilized nation may aspire. In [587] warlike maIevolence and abandon, the 
hosts of Islam, the Sioux Indian. and the "heathen of the northern sea" 
have set the mark above the reach of the most strenuous civilized warlord.
To modern civilized men, especially in their intervals of sober reflection, 
all these things that distinguish the barbarian civilization seem of 
dubious value and are required to show cause why they should not be 
slighted. It is not so with the knowledge of facts. The making of states 
and dynasties, the founding of families, the prosecution of feuds, the 
propagation of creeds and the creation of sects, the accumulation of 
fortunes, the consumption of superfluities - these have all in their time 
been felt to justify themselves as an end of endeavor; but in the eyes of 
modern civilized men all these things seem futile in comparison with the 
achievements of science. They dwindle in men's esteem as time passes, while 
the achievements of science are held higher as time passes. This is the one 
secure holding-ground of latterday conviction, that "the increase and 
diffusion of knowledge among men" is indefeasibly right and good. When seen 
in such perspective as will clear it of the trivial perplexities of workday 
life, this proposition is not questioned within the horizon of the western 
culture, and no other cultural ideal holds a similar unquestioned place in 
the convictions of civilized mankind.
On any large question which is to be disposed of for good and all the final 
appeal is by common consent taken to the scientist. The solution offered in 
the name of science is decisive so long as it is not set aside by a still 
more searching scientific inquiry. This state of things may not be 
altogether fortunate, but such is the fact. There are other, older grounds 
of finality that may conceivably be better, nobler, worthier, more 
profound, more beautiful. It might conceivably be preferable, as a matter 
of cultural ideals, to leave the last word with the lawyer, the duelist, 
the priest, the moralist, or the college of heraldry. In past times people 
have been content to leave their weightiest questions to the decision of 
some one or other of these tribunals, and, it cannot be denied, with very 
happy results in those respects that were then looked to with the greatest 
solicitude. But whatever the common-sense of earlier generations may have 
held in this [588] respect, modern common-sense holds that the scientist's 
answer is the only ultimately true one. In the last resort enlightened 
common-sense sticks by the opaque truth and refuses to go behind the 
returns given by the tangible facts.
Quasi lignum vitae in paradiso Dei, et quasi lucerna fulgoris in domo 
Domini, such is the place of science in modern civilization. This latter-
day faith in matter-of-fact knowledge may be well grounded or it may not. 
It has come about that men assign it this high place, perhaps idolatrously, 
perhaps to the detriment of the best and most intimate interests of the 
race, There is room for much more than a vague doubt that this cult of 
science is not altogether a wholesome growth - that the unmitigated quest 
of knowledge, of this matter-of-fact kind, makes for race-deterioration and 
discomfort on the whole, both in its immediate effects upon the spiritual 
life of mankind, and in the material consequences that follow from a great 
advance in matter-of-fact knowledge.
But we are not here concerned with the merits of the case. Thc question 
here is: How bas this cult of science arisen? What are its cultural 
antecedents? How far is it in consonance with hereditary human nature? and, 
What is the nature of its hold on the convictions of civilized men?
In dealing with pedagogical problems and the theory of education, current 
psychology is nearly at one in saying that all learning is of a 
,"pragmatic" character; that knowledge is inchoate action inchoately 
directed to an end; that all knowledge is ,,functional;" that it is of the 
nature of use. This, of course, is only a corollary under the main 
postulate of the latter-day psychologists, whose catchword is that The Idea 
is essentially active. There is no need of quarreling with this "pragmatic" 
school of psychologists. Their aphorism may not contain the whole truth, 
perhaps, but at least it goes nearer to the heart of the epistemological 
problem than any earlier formulation. It may confidently be said to do so 
because, for one thing, its argument meets the requirements of modern 
science. It is such a concept as matter of-fact science can make effective 
use of; it is drawn in terms [589] which are, in the last analysis, of an 
impersonal, not to say tropismatic, character; such as is demanded by 
science, with its insistence on opaque cause and effect. While knowledge is 
construed in teleological terms, in terms of personal interest and 
attention, this teleological aptitude is itself reducible to a product of 
unteleological natural selection. The teleological bent of intelligence is 
a hereditary trait settled upon the race by the selective action of forces 
that look to no end. The foundations of pragmatic intelligence arc not 
pragmatic, nor even personal or sensible.
This impersonal character of intelligence is, of course, most evident on 
the lower levels of life. If we follow Mr. Loeb, e. g., in his inquiries 
into the psychology of that life that lies below the threshold of 
intelligence, what we meet with is an aimless but unwavering motor response 
to stimulus.(1*) The response is of the nature of motor impulse, and in so 
far it is "pragmatic," if that term may fairly be applied to so rudimentary 
a phase of sensibility. The responding organism may be called an "agent" in 
so far. It is only by a figure of speech that these terms are made to apply 
to tropismatic reactions. Higher in the scale of sensibility and nervous 
complication instincts work to a somewhat similar outcome. On the human 
plane, intelligence (the selective effect of inhibitive complication) may 
throw the response into the form of a reasoned line of conduct looking to 
an outcome that shall be expedient for the agent. This is naive pragmatism 
of the developed kind. There is no longer a question but that the 
responding organism is an "agent," and that his intelligent response to 
stimulus is of a teleological character. But that is not all. The 
inhibitive nervous complication may also detach another chain of response 
to the given stimulus, which does not spend itself in a line of motor 
conduct and does not fall into a system of uses. Pragmatically speaking, 
this outlying chain of response is unintended and irrelevant. Except in 
urgent cases, such an idle response seems commonly to be present as a 
subsidiary phenomenon. If credence is given to the view [590] that 
intelligence is, in its elements, of the nature of an inhibitive selection, 
it sterns necessary to assume some such chain of idle and irrelevant 
response to account for the further course of the elements eliminated in 
giving the motor response the character of a reasoned line of conduct. So 
that associated with the pragmatic attention there is found more or less of 
an irrelevant attention, or idle curiosity. This is more particularly the 
case where a higher range of intelligence is present. This idle curiosity 
is, perhaps, closely related to the aptitude for play, observed both in man 
and in the lower animals.(2*) The aptitude for play, as well as the 
functioning of idle curiosity, seems peculiarly lively in the young, whose 
aptitude for sustained pragmatism is at the same time relatively vague and 
unreliable.
This idle curiosity formulates its response to stimulus, not in terms of an 
expedient line of conduct, nor even necessarily in a chain of motor 
activity, hut in terms of nie sequence of activities going on in the 
observed phenomena. The "interpretation" of the facts under the guidance of 
this idle curiosity may take the form of anthropomorphic or animistic 
explanations of the "conduct" of the objects observed. The interpretation 
of the facts takes a dramatic form. The facts are conceived in an animistic 
way, and a pragmatic animus is imputed to them. Their behavior is construed 
as a reasoned procedure an their part looking to the advantage of these 
animistically conceived objects, or looking to the achievement of some end 
which these objects are conceived to have at heart for reasons of their 
own.
Among the savage and lower barbarian peoples there is commonly current a 
large body of knowledge organized in this way into myths and legends, which 
need have no pragmatic value for the learner of them and no intended 
bearing on his conduct of practical affairs, They may come to have a 
practical value imputed to them as a ground of superstitious observances, 
but they may also not.(3*) All students of the lower cultures are aware of 
[591] the dramatic character of the myths current among these peoples, and 
they are also aware that, particularly among the peaceable communities, the 
great body of mythical lore is of an idle kind, as having very little 
intended bearing on the practical conduct of those who believe in these 
myth-dramas. The myths on the one hand, and the workday knowledge of uses, 
materials, appliances, and expedients on the other hand, may be nearly 
independent of one another. Such is the case in an especial degree among 
those peoples who are prevailingly of a peaceable habit of life, among whom 
the myths have not in any great measure been canonized into precedents of 
divine malevolence.
The lower barbarian's knowledge of the phenomena of nature, in so far as 
they are made the subject of deliberate speculation and are organized into 
a consistent body, is of the nature of life-histories. This body of 
knowledge is in the main organized under the guidance of an idle curiosity. 
In so far as it is systematized under the canons of curiosity rather than 
of expediency, the test of truth applied throughout this body of barbarian 
knowledge is the test of dramatic consistency. In addition to their 
dramatic cosmology and folk legends, it is needless to say, these peoples 
have also a considerable body of worldly wisdom in a more or less 
systematic form. In this the test of validity is usefullness.(4*)
The pragmatic knowledge of the early days differs scarcely at all in 
character from that of the maturest phases of culture. Its highest 
achievements in the direction of systematic formulation consist of didactic 
exhortations to thrift, prudence, equanimity, and shrewd management - a 
body of maxims of expedient con-[592]duct. In this field there is scarcely 
a degree of advance from Confucius to Samuel Smiles. Under the guidance of 
the idle curiosity, on the other hand, there has been a continued advance 
toward a more and more comprehensive system of knowledge. With the advance 
in intelligence and experience there come closer observation and more 
detailed analysis of facts.(5*) The dramatization of the sequence of 
phenomena may then fall into somewhat less personal, less anthropomorphic 
formulations of the processes observed; but at no stage of its growth - at 
least at no stage hitherto reached - does the output of this work of the 
idle curiosity lose its dramatic character. Comprehensive generalizations 
are made and cosmologies are built up, but always in dramatic form. General 
principles of explanation are settled on, which in the earlier days of 
theoretical speculation seem invariably to run back to the broad vital 
principle of generation. Procreation, birth, growth, and decay constitute 
the cycle of postulates within which the dramatized processes of natural 
phenomena run their course. Creation is procreation in these archaic 
theoretical systems, and causation is gestation and birth. The archaic 
cosmological schemes of Greece, India, Japan, China, Polynesia, and 
America, all run to the same general effect on this head.(6*)
Throughout this biological speculation there is present, obscurely in the 
background, the tacit recognition of a material causation, such as 
conditions the vulgar operations of workday life from hour to hour. But 
this causal relation between vulgar work and product is vaguely taken for 
granted and not made a principle for comprehensive generalizations. It is 
overlooked as a trivial matter of course. The higher generalizations take 
their color from the broader features of the current scheme of life. The 
habits of thought that rule in the working-out of a system of knowledge are 
such as are fostered by the more impressive affairs of life, by the 
institutional structure under which the community lives. So long as the 
ruling institutions are those of blood-relationship, descent, and clannish 
discrimination, so long the canons of knowledge are of the same complexion.
[593] When presently a transformation is made in the scheme of culture from 
peaceable life with sporadic predation to a settled scheme of predaceous 
life, involving mastery and servitude, gradations of privilege and honor, 
coercion and personal dependence, then the scheme of knowledge undergoes an 
analogous change. The predacious, or higher barbarian, culture is, for the 
present purpose, peculiar in that it is ruled by an accentuated pragmatism. 
The institutions of this cultural phase are conventionalized relations of 
force and fraud. The questions of life are questions of expedient conduct 
as carried on under the current relations of mastery and subservience. The 
habitual distinctions are distinctions of personal force, advantage, 
precedence, and authority. A shrewd adaptation to this System of graded 
dignity and servitude becomes a matter of life and death, and men learn to 
think in these terms as ultimate and definitive. The System of knowledge, 
even in so far as its motives are of a dispassionate or idle kind, falls 
into the like terms, because such are the habits of thought and the 
standards of discrimination enforced by daily life.(7*)
The theoretical work of such a cultural era, as, for instance, the Middle 
Ages, still takes the general shape of dramatization, but the postulates of 
the dramaturgic theories and the tests of theoretic validity are no longer 
the same as before the scheme of graded servitude came to occupy the field. 
The canons which guide the work of the idle curiosity are no longer those 
of generation, blood-relationship, and homely life, but rather those of 
graded dignity, authenticity, and dependence. The higher generalizations 
take on a new complexion, it may be without formally discarding the older 
articles of belief. The cosmologies of these higher barbarians are cast in 
terms of a feudalistic hierarchy of agents and elements, and the causal 
nexus between phenomena is conceived animistically after the manner of 
sympathetic magic. The laws that are sought to be discovered in the natural 
universe are sought in terms of authoritative enactment. The relation in 
which the deity, or deities, are conceived to stand to facts is no longer 
the relation of progenitor, so much as that [594] of suzerainty. Natural 
laws are corollaries under the arbitrary rules of status imposed on the 
natural universe by an all-powerful Providence with a view to the 
maintenance of his own prestige. The science that grows in such a spiritual 
environment is of the class represented by alchemy and astrology, in which 
the imputed degree of nobility and prepotency of the objects and the 
symbolic force of their names are looked to for an explanation of what 
takes place.
The theoretical output of the Schoolmen has necessarily an accentuated 
pragmatic complexion, since the whole cultural scheme under which they 
lived and worked was of a strenuously pragmatic character. The current 
concepts of things were then drawn in terms of expediency, personal force, 
exploit, prescriptive authority, and the like, and this range of concepts 
was by force of habit employed in the correlation of facts for purposes of 
knowledge even where no immediate practical use of the knowledge so gained 
was had in view. At the same time a very large proportion of the scholastic 
researches and speculations aimed directly at rules of expedient conduct, 
whether it took the form of a philosophy of life under temporal law and 
custom, or of a scheme of salvation under the decrees of an autocratic 
Providence. A naive apprehension of the dictum that all knowledge is 
pragmatic would find more satisfactory corroboration in the intellectual 
output of scholasticism than in any system of knowledge of an older or a 
later date.
With the advent of modern times a change comes over the nature of the 
inquiries and formulations worked out under the guidance of the idle 
curiosity - which from this epoch is often spoken of as the scientific 
spirit. The change in question is closely correlated with an analogous 
change in institutions and habits of life, particularly with the changes 
which the modern era brings in industry and in the economic organization of 
society. It is doubtful whether the characteristic intellectual interests 
and teachings of the new era can properly be spoken of as less "pragmatic," 
as that term is sometimes understood, than those of the scholastic times; 
but they are of another kind, being conditioned [595] by a different 
cultural and industrial situation.(8*) In the life of the new era 
conceptions of authentic rank and differential dignity have grown weaker in 
practical affairs, and notions of preferential reality and authentic 
tradition similarly count for less in the new science. The forces at work 
in the external world are conceived in a less animistic manner, although 
anthropomorphism still prevails, at least to the degree required in order 
to give a dramatic interpretation of the sequence of phenomena.
The changes in the cultural situation which seem to have had the most 
serious consequences for the methods and animus of scientific inquiry are 
those changes that took place in the field of industry. Industry in early 
modern times is a fact of relatively greater preponderance, more of a tone-
giving factor, than it was under the regime of feudal status. It is the 
characteristic trait of the modern culture, very much as exploit and fealty 
were the characteristic cultural traits of the earlier times. This early-
modern industry is, in an obvious and convincing degree, a matter of 
workmanship. The same has not been true in the same degree either before or 
since. The workman, more or less skilled and with more or less specialized 
efficiency, was the central figure in the cultural situation of the time; 
and so the concepts of the scientists carne to be drawn in the image of the 
workman. The dramatizations of the sequence of external phenomena 
worked out under the impulse of the idle curiosity were then conceived in 
terms of workmanship. Workmanship gradually supplanted differential dignity 
as the authoritative canon of scientific truth, even on the higher levels 
of speculation and research. This, of course, amounts to saying in other 
words that the law of cause and effect was given the first place, as 
contrasted with dialectical consistency and authentic tradition. But this 
early-modern law of cause and effect - the law of efficient causes - is of 
an anthropomorphic kind. "Like causes produce like effects," in much the 
[596] same sense as the skilled workman's product is like the workman; 
"nothing is found in the effect that was not contained in the cause," in 
much the same manner.
These dicta are, of course, older than modern science, but it is only in 
the early days of modern science that they come to rule the field with an 
unquestioned sway and to push the higher grounds of dialectical validity to 
one side. They invade even the highest and most recondite fields of 
speculation, so that at the approach to the transition from the early-
modern to the late-modern period, in the eighteenth century they determine 
the outcome even in the counsels of the theologians. The deity, from having 
been in mediaeval times primarily a suzerain concerned with the maintenance 
of his own prestige, becomes primarily a creator engaged in the workmanlike 
occupation of making things useful for man. His relation to man and the 
natural universe is no longer primarily that of a progenitor, as it is in 
the lower barbarian culture, but rather that of a talented mechanic. The 
"natural laws" which the scientists of that era make so much of are no 
longer decrees of a preternatural legislative authority, but rather details 
of the workshop specifications handed down by the master-craftsman for the 
guidance of handicraftsmen working out his designs. In the eighteenth-
century science these natural laws are laws specifying the sequence of 
cause and effect, and will bear characterization as a dramatic 
interpretation of the activity of the causes at work, and these causes are 
conceived in a quasi-personal manner. In later modern times the 
formulations of causal sequence grow more impersonal and more objective, 
more matter-of-fact; but the imputation of activity to the observed objects 
never ceases, and even in the latest and maturest formulations of 
scientific research the dramatic tone is not wholly lost. The causes at 
work are conceived in a highly impersonal way, but hitherto no science 
(except ostensibly mathematics) has been content to do its theoretical work 
in terms of inert magnitude alone. Activity continues to be imputed to the 
phenomena with which science deals; and activity is, of course, not a fact 
of observation, but is imputed to the phenomena by the observer. (9*) This 
is, also [597] of course, denied by those who insist on a purely 
mathematical formulation of scientific theories, but the denial is 
maintained only at the cost of consistency. Those eminent authorities who 
speak for a colorless mathematical formulation invariably and necessarily 
fall back on the (essentially metaphysical) preconception of causation as 
soon as they go into the actual work of scientific inquiry.(10*)
Since the machine technology has made great advances, during the nineteenth 
century, and has become a cultural force of wide-reaching consequence, the 
formulations of science have made another move in the direction of 
impersonal matter-of-fact. The machine process has displaced the workman as 
the archetype in whose image causation is conceived by the scientific 
investigators. The dramatic interpretation of natural phenomena has thereby 
become less anthropomorphic; it no longer constructs the life-history of a 
cause working to produce a given effect - after the manner of a skilled 
workman producing a piece of wrought goods - but it constructs the life-
history of a process in which the distinction between cause and effect need 
scarcely be observed in an itemized and specific way, but in which the run 
of causation unfolds itself in an unbroken sequence of cumulative change. 
By contrast with the pragmatic formulations of worldly wisdom these latter-
day theories of the scientists appear highly opaque, impersonal, and 
matter-of-fact; but taken by themselves they must be admitted still to show 
the constraint of the dramatic prepossessions that once guided the savage 
myth-makers.
In so far as touches the aims and the animus of scientific inquiry, as seen 
from the point of view of the scientist, it is a wholly fortuitous and 
insubstantial coincidence that much of the knowledge gained under machine-
made canons of research can be turned to practical account. Much of this 
knowledge is useful, or may be made so, by applying it to the control of 
the processes in which natural forces are engaged. This employment of 
scien-[598]tific knowledge for useful ends in technology, in the broad 
sense in which the term includes, besides the machine industry proper, such 
branches of practice as engineering, agriculture, medicine, sanitation, and 
economic reforms. The reason why scientific theories can be turned to 
account for these practical ends is not that these ends are included in the 
scope of scientific inquiry. These useful purposes lie outside the 
scientist's interest. It is not that he aims, or can aim, at technological 
improvements. His inquiry is as "idle" as that of the Pueblo myth-maker. 
But the canons of validity under whose guidance he works are those imposed 
by the modern technology, through habituation to its requirements; and 
therefore his results are available for the technological purpose. His 
canons of validity are made for him by the cultural situation; they are 
habits of thought imposed on him by the scheme of life current in the 
community in which he lives; and under modern conditions this scheme of 
life is largely machine-made. In the modern culture, industry, industrial 
processes, and industrial products have progressively gained upon humanity, 
until these creations of man's ingenuity have latterly come to take the 
dominant place in the cultural scheme; and it is not too much to say that 
they have become the chief force in shaping men's daily life, and therefore 
the chief factor in shaping men's habits of thought. Hence men have learned 
to think in the terms in which the technological processes act. This is 
particularly true of those men who by virtue of a peculiarly strong 
susceptibility in this direction become addicted to that habit of matter-
of-fact inquiry that constitutes scientific research.
Modern technology makes use of the same range of concepts, thinks in the 
same terms, and applies the same tests of validity as modern science. In 
both, the terms of standardization, validity, and finality are always terms 
of impersonal sequence, not terms of human nature or of preternatural 
agencies. Hence the easy copartnership between the two. Science and 
technology play into one another's hands. The processes of nature with 
which science deals and which technology turns to account, the sequence of 
changes in the external world, animate and inanimate, run in terms of brute 
causation, as do the theories of science. These [599] processes take no 
thought of human expediency or inexpediency. To make use of them they must 
be taken as they are, opaque and unsympathetic. Technology, therefore, has 
come to proceed on an interpretation of these phenomena in mechanical 
terms, not in terms of imputed personality nor even of workmanship. Modern 
science, deriving its concepts from the same source, carries on its 
inquiries and states its conclusions in terms of the same objective 
character as those employed by the mechanical engineer.
So it has come about, through the progressive change of the ruling habits; 
of thought in the community, that the theories of science have 
progressively diverged from the formulations of pragmatism, ever since the 
modern era set in. From an organization of knowledge on the basis of 
imputed personal or animistic propensity the theory has changed its base to 
an imputation of brute activity only, and this latter is conceived in an 
increasingly matter-of-fact manner; until, latterly, the pragmatic range of 
knowledge and the scientific are more widely out of touch than ever, 
differing not only in aim, but in matter as well. In both domains knowledge 
runs in terms of activity, but it is on the one hand knowledge of what had 
best be done, and on the other hand knowledge of what takes place; on the 
one hand knowledge of ways and means, on the other hand knowledge without 
any ulterior purpose. The latter range of knowledge may serve the ends of 
the former, but the converse does not hold true.
These two divergent ranges of inquiry are to be found together in all 
phases of human culture. What distinguishes the present phase is that the 
discrepancy between the two is now wider than ever before. The present is 
nowise distinguished above other cultural eras by any exceptional urgency 
or acumen in the search for pragmatic expedients. Neither is it safe to 
assert that the present excels all other civilizations in the volume or the 
workmanship of that body of knowledge that is to be credited to the idle 
curiosity. What distinguishes the present in these premises is (I) that the 
primacy in the cultural scheme has passed from pragmatism to a 
disinterested inquiry whose motive is idle curiosity, and (2) that in the 
domain of the latter the making of [600] myths and legends in terms of 
imputed personality, as well as the construction of dialectical systems in 
terms of differential reality, has yielded the first place to the making of 
theories in terms of matter-of-fact sequence. (11*)
Pragmatism creates nothing but maxims of expedient conduct. Science creates 
nothing but theories.(12*) It knows nothing of policy or utility, of better 
or worse. None of all that is comprised in what is today accounted 
scientific knowledge. Wisdom and proficiency of the pragmatic sort does not 
contribute to the advance of a knowledge of fact. It has only an incidental 
bearing on scientific research, and its bearing is chiefly that of 
inhibition and misdirection. Wherever canons of expediency are intruded 
into or are attempted to be incorporated in the inquiry, the consequence is 
an unhappy one for science, however happy it may be for some other purpose 
extraneous to science. The mental attitude of worldly wisdom is at cross-
purposes with the disinterested scientific spirit, and the pursuit of it 
induces an intellectual bias that is incompatible with scientific insight. 
Its intellectual output is a body of shrewd rules of conduct, in great part 
designed to take advantage of human infirmity. Its habitual terms of 
standardization and validity are terms of human nature, of human 
preference, prejudice, aspiration, endeavor, and disability, and the habit 
of mind that goes with it is such as is consonant with these terms. No 
doubt, the all-pervading pragmatic animus of the older and non-European 
civilizations has had more than anything else to do with their relatively 
slight and slow advance in scientific knowledge. In the modern scheme of 
knowledge it holds true, in a similar manner and with analogous effect, 
that training in divinity, in law, and in the related branches of 
diplomacy, business tactics, military affairs, and political theory, is 
alien to the skeptical scientific spirit and subversive of it.
The modern scheme of culture comprises a large body of worldly wisdom, as 
well as of science. This pragmatic lore stands over against science with 
something of a jealous reserve. The pragmatists value themselves somewhat 
on being useful as [601] well as being efficient for good and evil. They 
feel the inherent antagonism between themselves and the scientists, and 
look with some doubt on the latter as being merely decorative triflers, 
although they sometimes borrow the prestige of the name of science - as is 
only good and well, since it is of the essence of worldly wisdom to borrow 
anything that can be turned to account. The reasoning in these fields turns 
about questions of personal advantage of one kind or another, and the 
merits of the claims canvassed in these discussions are decided on grounds 
of authenticity. Personal claims make up the subject of the inquiry, and 
these claims are construed and decided in terms of precedent and choice, 
use and wont, prescriptive authority, and the like. The higher reaches of 
generalization in these pragmatic inquiries are of the nature of deductions 
from authentic tradition, and the training in this class of reasoning gives 
discrimination in respect of authenticity and expediency. The resulting 
habit of mind is a bias for substituting dialectical distinctions and 
decisions de jure in the place of explanations de facto. The so-called 
"sciences" associated with these pragmatic disciplines, such as 
jurisprudence, political science, and the like, is a taxonomy of credenda. 
Of this character was the greater part of the "science" cultivated by the 
Schoolmen, and large remnants of the same kind of authentic convictions 
are, of course, still found among the tenets of the scientists, 
particularly in the social sciences, and no small solicitude is still given 
to their cultivation. Substantially the same value as that of the temporal 
pragmatic inquiries belongs also, of course, to the "science" of divinity. 
Here the questions to which an answer is sought, as well as the aim and 
method of inquiry, are of the same pragmatic character, although the 
argument runs on a higher plane of personality, and seeks a solution in 
terms of a remoter and more metaphysical expediency.
In the light of what has been said above, the questions recur: How far is 
the scientific quest of matter-of-fact knowledge consonant with the 
inherited intellectual aptitudes and propensities of the normal man? and, 
What foothold has science in the modern culture? The former is a question 
of the temperamental heritage [602] of civilized mankind, and therefore it 
is in large part a question of the circumstances which have in the past 
selectively shaped the human nature of civilized mankind. Under the 
barbarian culture, as well as on the lower levels of what is currently 
called civilized life, the dominant note has been that of competitive 
expediency for the individual or the group, great or small, in an avowed 
struggle for the means of life. Such is still the ideal of the politician 
and business man, as well as of other classes whose habits of life lead 
them to cling to the inherited barbarian traditions. The upper-barbarian 
and lower-civilized culture, as has already been indicated, is pragmatic, 
with a thoroughness that nearly bars out any non-pragmatic ideal of life or 
of knowledge. Where this tradition is strong there is but a precarious 
chance for any consistent effort to formulate knowledge in other terms than 
those drawn from the prevalent relations of personal mastery and 
subservience and the ideals of personal gain.
During the Dark and Middle Ages, for instance, it is true in the main that 
any movement of thought not controlled by considerations of expediency and 
conventions of status are to be found only in the obscure depths of vulgar 
life, among those neglected elements of the population that lived below the 
reach of the active class struggle. What there is surviving of this vulgar, 
non pragmatic intellectual output takes the form of legends and folk-tales, 
often embroidered on the authentic documents of the Faith. These are less 
alien to the latest and highest culture of Christendom than are the 
dogmatic, dialectical, and chivalric productions that occupied the 
attention of the upper classes in mediaeval times. It may seem a curious 
paradox that the latest and most perfect flower of the western civilization 
is more nearly akin to the spiritual life of the serfs and villeins than it 
is to that of the grange or the abbey. The courtly life and the chivalric 
habits of thought of that past phase of culture have left as nearly no 
trace in the cultural scheme of later modern times as could well be. Even 
the romancers who ostensibly rehearse the phenomena of chivalry, 
unavoidably make their knights and ladies speak the language and the 
sentiments of the slums of that time, tempered with certain schematized 
modern reflections and speculations. [603] The gallantries, the genteel 
inanities and devout imbecilities of mediaeval high-life would be 
insufferable even to the meanest and most romantic modern intelligence. So 
that in a later, less barbarian age the precarious remnants of folklore 
that have come down through that vulgar channel - half savage and more than 
half pagan - are treasured as containing the largest spiritual gains which 
the barbarian ages of Europe have to offer.
The sway of barbarian pragmatism has, everywhere in the western world, been 
relatively brief and relatively light; the only exceptions would be found 
in certain parts of the Mediterranean seaboard. But wherever the barbarian 
culture has been sufficiently long-lived and unmitigated to work out a 
thoroughly selective effect in the human material subjected to it, there 
the pragmatic animus may be expected to have become supreme and to inhibit 
all movement in the direction of scientific inquiry and eliminate all 
effective aptitude for other than worldly wisdom. What the selective 
consequences of such a protracted regime of pragmatism would be for the 
temper of the race may be seen in the human flotsam left by the great 
civilizations of antiquity, such as Egypt, India, and Persia. Science is 
not at home among these leavings of barbarism. In these instances of its 
long and unmitigated dominion the barbarian culture has selectively worked 
out a temperamental bias and a scheme of life from which objective, matter-
of-fact knowledge is virtually excluded in favor of pragmatism, secular and 
religious. But for the greater part of the race, at least for the greater 
part of civilized mankind, the regime of the mature barbarian culture has 
been of relatively short duration, and has had a correspondingly 
superficial and transient selective effect. It has not had force and time 
to eliminate certain elements of human nature handed down from an earlier 
phase of life, which are not in full consonance with the barbarian animus 
or with the demands of the pragmatic scheme of thought. The barbarian-
pragmatic habit of mind, therefore, is not properly speaking a 
temperamental trait of the civilized peoples, except possibly within 
certain class limits (as, e. g., the German nobility). It is rather a 
tradition, and it does not constitute so tenacious a bias as to make head 
against the [604] strongly materialistic drift of modern conditions and set 
aside that increasingly urgent resort to matter-of-fact conceptions that 
makes for the primacy of science. Civilized mankind does not in any great 
measure take back atavistically to the upper-barbarian habit of mind. 
Barbarism covers too small a segment of the life-history of the race to 
have given an enduring temperamental result. The unmitigated discipline of 
the higher barbarism in Europe fell on a relatively small proportion of the 
population, and in the course of time this select element of the population 
was crossed and blended with the blood of the lower elements whose life 
always continued to run in the ruts of savagery rather than in those of the 
high-strung, finished barbarian culture that gave rise to the chivalric 
scheme of life.
Of the several phases of human culture the most protracted, and the one 
which has counted for most in shaping the abiding traits of the race, is 
unquestionably that of savagery. With savagery, for the purpose in hand, is 
to be classed that lower, relatively peaceable barbarism that is not 
characterized by wide and sharp class discrepancies or by an unremitting 
endeavor of one individual or group to get the better of another. Even 
under the full-grown barbarian culture - as, for instance, during the 
Middle Ages - the habits of life and the spiritual interests of the great 
body of the population continue in large measure to bear the character of 
savagery. The savage phase of culture accounts for by far the greater 
portion of the life-history of mankind, particularly if the lower barbarism 
and the vulgar life of later barbarism be counted in with savagery, as in a 
measure they properly should. This is particularly true of those racial 
elements that have entered into the composition of the leading peoples of 
Christendom.
The savage culture is characterized by the relative absence of pragmatism 
from the higher generalizations of its knowledge and beliefs. As has been 
noted above, its theoretical creations are chiefly of the nature of 
mythology shading off into folklore. This genial spinning of apocryphal 
yarns is, at its best, an amiably inefficient formulation of experiences 
and observations in terms of something like a life-history of the phenomena 
ob-[605]served. It has, on the one hand, little value, and little purpose, 
in the way of pragmatic expediency, and so it is not closely akin to the 
pragmatic-barbarian scheme of life; while, on the other hand, it is also 
ineffectual as a systematic knowledge of matter-of-fact. It is a quest of 
knowledge, perhaps of systematic knowledge, and it is carried on under the 
incentive of the idle curiosity. In this respect it falls in the same class 
with the civilized man's science; but it seeks knowledge not in terms of 
opaque matter-of-fact, but in terms of some sort of a spiritual life 
imputed to the facts. It is romantic and Hegelian rather than realistic and 
Darwinian. The logical necessities of its scheme of thought are necessities 
of spiritual consistency rather than of quantitative equivalence. It is 
like science in that it has no ulterior motive beyond the idle craving for 
a systematic correlation of data; but it is unlike science in that its 
standardization and correlation of data run in terms of the free play of 
imputed personal initiative rather than in terms of the constraint of 
objective cause and effect.
By force of the protracted selective discipline of this past phase of 
culture, the human nature of civilized mankind is still substantially the 
human nature of savage man. The ancient equipment of congenital aptitudes 
and propensities stands over substantially unchanged, though overlaid with 
barbarian traditions and conventionalities and readjusted by habituation to 
the exigencies of civilized life. In a measure, therefore, but by no means 
altogether, scientific inquiry is native to civilized man with his savage 
heritage, since scientific inquiry proceeds on the same general motive of 
idle curiosity as guided the savage myth-makers, though it makes use of 
concepts and standards in great measure alien to the myth-makers' habit of 
mind. The ancient human predilection for discovering a dramatic play of 
passion and intrigue in the phenomena of nature still asserts itself. In 
the most advanced communities, and even among the adepts of modern science, 
there comes up persistently the revulsion of the native savage against the 
inhumanly dispassionate sweep of the scientific quest, as well as against 
the inhumanly ruthless fabric of technological processes that have come out 
of this [606] search for matter-of-fact knowledge. Very often the savage 
need of a spiritual interpretation (dramatization) of phenomena breaks 
through the crust of acquired materialistic habits of thought, to find such 
refuge as may be had in articles of faith seized on and held by sheer force 
of instinctive conviction. Science and its creations are more or less 
uncanny, more or less alien, to that fashion of craving for knowledge that 
by ancient inheritance animates mankind. Furtively or by an overt breach of 
consistency, men still seek comfort in marvelous articles of savage-born 
lore, which contradict the truths of that modern science whose dominion 
they dare not question, but whose findings at the same time go beyond the 
breaking point of their jungle-fed spiritual sensibilities.
The ancient ruts of savage thought and conviction are smooth and easy; but 
however sweet and indispensable the archaic ways of thinking may be to the 
civilized man's peace of mind, yet such is the binding force of matter-of-
fact analysis and inference under modern conditions that the findings of 
science are not questioned on the whole. The name of science is after all a 
word to conjure with. So much so that the name and the mannerisms, at 
least, if nothing more of science, have invaded all fields of learning and 
have even overrun territory that belongs to the enemy. So there are 
"sciences" of theology, law, and medicine, as has already been noted above. 
And there are such things as Christian Science, and "scientific" astrology, 
palmistry, and the like. But within the field of learning proper there is a 
similar predilection for an air of scientific acumen and precision where 
science does not belong. So that even that large range of knowledge that 
has to do with general information rather than with theory - what is 
loosely termed scholarship - tends strongly to take on the name and forms 
of theoretical statement. However decided the contrast between these 
branches of knowledge on the one hand, and science properly so called on 
the other hand, yet even the classical learning, and the humanities 
generally, fall in with this predilection more and more with each 
succeeding generation of students. The students of literature, for 
instance, are more and more prone to substitute critical [607] analysis and 
linguistic speculation, as the end of their endeavors, in the place of that 
discipline of taste and that cultivated sense of literary form and literary 
feeling that must always remain the chief end of literary training, as 
distinct from philology and the social sciences. There is, of course, no 
intention to question the legitimacy of a science of philology or of the 
analytical study of literature as a fact in cultural history, but these 
things do not constitute training in literary taste, nor can they take the 
place of it. The effect of this straining after scientific formulations in 
a field alien to the scientific spirit is as curious as it is wasteful. 
Scientifically speaking, the quasi-scientific inquiries necessarily begin 
nowhere and end in the same place; while in point of cultural gain they 
commonly come to nothing better than spiritual abnegation. But these 
blindfold endeavors to conform to the canons of science serve to show how 
wide and unmitigated the sway of science is in the modern community.
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 [608] 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.
All that has been said above has of course nothing to say as to the 
intrinsic merits of this quest of matter-of-fact knowledge. In point of 
fact, science gives its tone to modern culture. One may approve or one may 
deprecate the fact that this opaque, materialistic interpretation of things 
pervades modern thinking. That is a question of taste, about which there is 
no disputing. The prevalence of this matter-of-fact inquiry is a feature of 
modern culture, and the attitude which critics take toward this phenomenon 
is chiefly significant as indicating how far their own habit of mind 
coincides with the enlightened common-sense of civilized mankind. It shows 
in what degree they are abreast of the advance of culture. Those in whom 
the savage predilection or the barbarian tradition is stronger than their 
habituation to civilized life will find that this dominant factor of modern 
life is perverse, if not calamitous; those whose habits of thought have 
been fully shaped by the machine process and scientific inquiry are likely 
to find it good. The modern western culture, with its core of matter-of-
fact knowledge, may be better or worse than some other cultural scheme, 
such as the classic Greek, the mediaeval Christian, the Hindu, or the 
Pueblo Indian. Seen in certain lights, tested by certain standards, it is 
doubtless better; by other standards, worse. But the fact remains that the 
current cultural scheme, in its maturest growth, is of that complexion; its 
characteristic force lies in this matter-of-fact insight; its highest 
discipline and its maturest aspirations are these.
In point of fact, the sober common-sense of civilized mankind accepts no 
other end of endeavor as self-sufficient and ultimate. That such is the 
case seems to be due chiefly to the ubiquitous presence of the machine 
technology and its creations in the life of modern communities. And so long 
as the machine process continues to hold its dominant place as a 
disciplinary [609] factor in modern culture, so long must the spiritual and 
intellectual life of this cultural era maintain the character which the 
machine process gives it.
But while the scientist's spirit and his achievements stir an unqualified 
admiration in modern men, and while his discoveries carry conviction as 
nothing else does, it does not follow that the manner of man which this 
quest of knowledge produces or requires comes near answering to the current 
ideal of manhood, or that his conclusions are felt to be as good and 
beautiful as they are true. The ideal man, and the ideal of human life, 
even in the apprehension of those who most rejoice in the advances of 
science, is neither the finking skeptic in the laboratory nor the animated 
slide-rule. The quest of science is relatively new. It is a cultural factor 
not comprised, in anything like its modern force, among those circumstances 
whose selective action in the far past has given to the race the human 
nature which it now has. The race reached the human plane with little of 
this searching knowledge of facts; and throughout the greater part of its 
life-history on the human plane it has been accustomed to make its higher 
generalizations and to formulate its larger principles of life in other 
terms than those of passionless matter-of-fact. This manner of knowledge 
has occupied an increasing share of men's attention in the past, since it 
bears in a decisive way upon the minor affairs of workday life; but it has 
never until now been put in the first place, as the dominant note of human 
culture. The normal man, such as his inheritance has made him, has 
therefore good cause to be restive under its dominion.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

NOTES:
1) Jacques Loeb, Heliotropismus der Thiere and Comparative Psychology and 
Physiology of the Brain.
2) Cf. Gross, Spiele der Thiere, chap. 3 (esp. pp. 65-76), and chap. 5; The 
Play of Man, Part III, sec. 3; Spencer, Principles of Psychology, secs. 
533-35.
3) The myths and legendary lore of the Eskimo, the Pueblo Indians, and some 
tribes of the northwest coast afford good instances of such idle creations. 
Cf. various Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology; also, e. g., 
Tylor, Primitive Culture, esp. the chapters on "Mythology" and "Animism."
4) "Pragmatic" is here used in a more restricted sense than the 
distinctively pragmatic school of modern psychologists would commonly 
assign the term. "Pragmatic", "teleological" and the like terms have been 
extended to cover imputation of purpose as well as conversion to use. It is 
not intended to criticise this ambiguous use of terms, nor to correct it; 
but the terms are here used only in the latter sense, which alone belongs 
to them by force of early usage and etymology. "Pragmatic" knowledge, 
therefore, is such as is designed to serve an expedient end for the knower, 
and is here contrasted with the imputation of expedient conduct to the 
facts observed. The reason for preserving this distinction is simply the 
present need of a simple term by which to mark the distinction between 
worldly wisdom and idle learning.
5) Cf. Ward, Pure Sociology, esp. pp. 437-48.
6) Cf., e. g., Tylor, Primitive Culture, chap. 8.
7) Cf. James, Psychology, chap. 9, esp. sec. 5.
8) As currently employed, the term "pragmatic" is made to cover both 
conduct looking to the agent's preferential advantage, expedient conduct, 
and workmanship directed to the production of things that may or may not be 
of advantage to the agent. If the term be taken in the latter meaning, the 
culture of modern times ist no less "pragmatic" than that of the Middle 
Ages. It is here intended to be used in the former sense.
9) Epistemologically speaking, activity is imputed to phenomena for the 
purpose of organizing them into a dramatically consistent system.
10) Cf., e. g., Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, and compare his ideal of 
inert magnitudes as set forth in his exposition with his actual work as 
shown in chaps. 9, 10, and 12, and more particularly in his discussions of 
"Mother Right" and related topics in The Chances of Death.
11) Cf. James, Psychology, Vol. II, chap. 28, pp. 633-71, esp. p. 640 note,
12) Cf. Ward, Principles of Psychology, pp. 439-43.
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