Ker sta dva tedna naokrog, povezava na mojo novo IUS kolumno, kjer sem se ob bok razpravi o centrih odličnosti še malo hudomušno razpisal o vprašanju, ali je pravo znanost. Kolumno si lahko preberete na tej strani, tu pa za bonus še sklepne misli iz razprave Oliverja Wendella Holmesa iz leta 1899 z naslovom “Law in Science and Science in Law”:
Gentlemen, I have tried to show by examples something of the interest of science as applied to the law, and to point out some possible improvement in our way of approaching practical questions in the same sphere. To the latter attempt, no doubt, many will hardly be ready to yield me their assent. But in that field, as in the other, I have had in mind an ultimate dependence upon science because it is finally for science to determine, so far as it can, the relative worth of our different social ends, and, as I have tried to hint, it is our estimate of the proportion between these, now often blind and unconscious, that leads us to insist upon and to enlarge the sphere of one principle and to allow another gradually to dwindle into atrophy. Very likely it may be that with all the help that statistics and every modern appliance can bring us there never will be a commonwealth in which science is everywhere supreme. But it is an ideal, and without ideals what is life worth? They furnish us our perspectives and open glimpses of the infinite. It often is a merit of an ideal to be unattainable. Its being so keeps forever before us something more to be done, and saves us from the ennui of a monotonous perfection. At the least it glorifies dull details, and uplifts and sustains weary years of toil with George Herbert’s often quoted but ever inspiring verse:“Who sweeps a room as in Thy cause,
Makes that and the action fine.”
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