Science & Tech Quote by Dmitri Mendeleev

Mendeleev isn’t just praising science here; he’s staking a claim about jurisdiction. Science, in his telling, doesn’t merely catalog facts or build clever instruments. Its core job is to reveal that nature is ruled by an underlying order and then to name the causes that enforce it. Coming from the architect of the periodic table, that’s not abstract philosophy. It’s a self-portrait: he found a pattern where others saw a heap of elements, and he treated that pattern as evidence that reality is intelligible, even predictive.

The provocative turn is the expansion clause: this “reign of order” applies as much to human relations - social and political - as it does to the cosmos. That’s a 19th-century move with sharp edges. In the wake of Darwin, industrialization, and the rising prestige of physics and chemistry, many thinkers tried to launder social hierarchy, nationalism, and policy choices through the authority of “laws” and “causes.” Mendeleev’s phrasing borrows the prestige of natural science to imply that society, too, has discoverable regularities that experts can diagnose.

The subtext is both optimistic and disciplining. Optimistic because it promises comprehension over chaos: if there is order, progress is possible. Disciplining because it nudges politics away from argument, values, and power - and toward technocratic necessity. If social life has causes “governing” it, then disagreement can be framed as ignorance, not conflict. It’s a scientist’s confidence, and also a quiet bid to make the scientist a legitimate authority beyond the laboratory.