Quote#Nature
The means whereby this work of Nature is brought to its consummate…
Quote byThorstein Veblen · 1857–1929
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), p. 67.
English (original)
The means whereby this work of Nature is brought to its consummate issue are forces of Nature working under her Laws by the method of cause and effect. The principle, or "law," of causation is a metaphysical postulate; in the sense that such a fact as causation is unproved and unprovable. No man has ever observed a case of causation, as is a commonplace with the latterday psychologists.
— Thorstein Veblen
More from Thorstein Veblen
The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.
Any evolutionary science... is a close-knit body of theory. It is a theory of a process, of an unfolding sequence... of cumulative causation. The great deserts of the evolutionist leaders... lie... in their having shown how this colorless …
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.