Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Scientism in the Writing of History 147
the problem of scientism, that is, the undue application of the
terminology and of the methods of science to the study of man,
and I had indeed faced it before, as the passage quoted from my
essay of 1949 makes clear. Yet I must confess that until I received
the invitation to this symposium, I had not, as a matter of fact,
ever dealt with the problem exclusively, let alone exhaustively.
Now, instructive and at times revealing as I have found the four
days' discussion to which it has been my privilege to listen and
in which I took part, I am still inclined to view scientism primarily
as one method out of several in the service of an attitude
of mind-of a mood, be it of a compelling desire to recast the
world in conformity with an ideal, or merely of dissatisfaction, of
despair. And perhaps it is enough to point to the more general
human trait to which I alluded in the passage quoted, a trait
stronger in some men than in others, of being liable to be fasci ...
nated by a system, any system. This tendency, if examined more
closely, will generally prove to be connected with the habit of
thinking in absolutes, which may be characteristic of a minority
of men only, but which can develop great dynamic power and
carry away simple-minded multitudes.; or with the craving for
certainty which all of us can observe in ourselves, although here
again some are less able to bear uncertainty than are others.
Now the historian, as I have insisted time and again (and I
never imagined that I was saying anything new or original), moves
in a sphere of uncertainty. We keep on trying to get into touch
with the realities of past life; the inexhaustible attraction of history
is in that it does help us to achieve this miracle; yet at the
same time its revelations will always be incomplete; there always
remains something mysterious and unfathomable.
As I wrote in the first page of my essay on Ranke,3
History is infinite. It is unfixable. We are trying all the time to reduce
past reality to terms of certainty, but all we can do is to render our
own impression of it. No book can reproduce more than a part of that
reality, even within the confines of its particular subject; and each
book contains something else, which gets mixed up with historical