Science & Tech Quote by Dean Inge

A clean little scalpel of a line: you can cheer for science without signing up for the metaphysics some scientists smuggle in with it. Inge is targeting a familiar sleight of hand, the moment when empirical success gets cashed out as philosophical authority. The subtext is less anti-science than anti-imperial: he’s policing borders. Science earns its prestige by being ruthlessly specific about what it can test; the “very poor philosophies” he names are the overconfident extrapolations - materialism as moral worldview, progress as destiny, “because it works” as “therefore it’s true.”

It works rhetorically because it flatters science (praising it) while sharply demoting “scientific men” as philosophers. That distinction matters. Inge isn’t arguing that science is wrong; he’s arguing that scientists, as a class, often become bad at philosophy precisely when they’re most successful at science. Mastery in one domain encourages a tone of inevitability in another, and Inge hears that tone as intellectual category error.

Context helps: Inge is writing from an early 20th-century British milieu where scientism and secular confidence were ascendant, and where clergy-intellectuals like him were trying to keep moral and metaphysical questions from being treated as obsolete. His jab lands as a defense of philosophy’s autonomy - and a warning that “following the evidence” can quietly morph into following the priesthood of expertise. The line’s sting is that it indicts not science but the temptation to turn scientific authority into a total worldview.