The High Priori road

Let others creep by timid steps, and slow,

On plain experience lay foundations low,

By common sense to common knowledge bred,

And last, to Nature's Cause through Nature led.

All-seeing in thy mists, we want no guide,

Mother of Arrogance, and Source of Pride!

We nobly take the high Priori Road,*

And reason downward, till we doubt of God

Alexander Pope ("The Dunciad" 1742, IV, lines 465-72)

In a footnote, Pope refers to Hobbes, Spinoza, and Descartes.

"Allow me to congratulate you upon the felicity with which you have thus 'taken the high priori road,' and endeavoured to depreciate an anonymous letter, by declaring the correspondent to be drunk." John Cam Hobhouse (A defence of the people, in reply to Lord Erskine's "Two defences of the Whigs", 1819)

"The second, or physical part of science, embracing all those inductive studies respecting unliving or unorganized bodies, which proceed mainly through out ward observation or experiment, and can as yet make little progress in 'the high priori road'." Sir William Hamilton ("Inaugural Address," Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 1838)

"With the economists who take the 'high priori road,' and anticipate the results of science by assuming the facts from which their principles are deduced, I presume not to contend." Robert Torrens ("A letter to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell on the ministerial measure forestablishing poor laws in Ireland...,"1838)

"He promised to lead us up to the great truth of all religion by a new path, -- to 'nobly take the high priori road, and reason downwards'; but, after a little digression, he conducts us back again to the old travelled way, where alone we can obtain firm footing." (anon, Review of On Natural Theology by Thomas Chalmers, The North American Review, 1842)

"I am unable to see why we should be forbidden to take the shortest cut from these sufficient premises to the conclusion, and constrained to travel the 'high priori road,' by the arbitrary fiat of logicians." John Stuart Mill (A System of Logic, 1843)

"Those who have been led to regard the method of empirical psychology as the only method which preserves the reality of things, by preventing the thinker from overriding and destroying the facts of life, minister to their own self-satisfaction by taunting the speculative thinker with going along the 'high priori road' he has constructed for himself above and beyond the real world. The charge can only provoke a smile in those who know how wide of the mark it really is. Speculative philosophy makes no pretensions to the 'construction' of reality in the ordinary sense of the word, but only to such an explanation of reality as shall account for the facts in their completeness." John Watson (Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1878)

The "scientific claims [of Spencer's method] are plainly declared in chapter v., on 'Ways of judging Conduct'; from which we learn that Mr. [Herbert] Spencer's way of judging it is to be a high priori road." Henry Sidgwick (Mind, 1880) (Spencer's reply)

"A good many evolutionists have been floored by a serious interruption to the continuity of their 'high priori' road, and not a few of them do not yet know just what has hurt them. That such an evanescent and unsubstantial condition as consciousness should have the gravity necessary to throw a triumphant army of advance into confusion, could hardly be suspected." A. S. Packard, Jr. and E. D. Cope (The American Naturalist, 1882)

"If, now and again, frequenters of 'the high priori road' have been less vocal in [Mind's] pages, it is only because they have not chosen to make use of the opportunity of utterance here afforded." George Croom Robertson (Mind, 1891)

"In view of these facts it seems advisable to travel the 'high priori road' as far as it will take us, and for the rest, to rely on our best experience and judgment." Archibald Lamont Daniels ("The Measurement of Saw Logs and Round Timber," Journal of Forestry, 1905) (Daniels was a math professor at the University of Vermont, see pp. 43-44 of this pdf published by his dept.)

"Ryle's extraordinary confidence that he knows what is a 'howler' and what isn't contrasts very oddly with the delicacy of a philologist's discussion of synonyms. The 'high priori road' is not yet dead in Oxford, after all." John Passmore ("Professor Ryle's Use of 'Use' and 'Usage'," Philosophical Review, 1954)

"We cannot then take a 'high priori road' out of our dilemma, by defining 'free' in terms of paradigm cases." A. C. MacIntyre (Mind, 1957)

Also, in 1967, R. S. Crane titled a book chapter "Criticism as Inquiry; or, The Perils of the 'High Priori Road'" (in The idea of the humanities, and other essays critical and historical)

"In literature, as in other subjects, the best students are those who respond to intellectual honesty, who distrust the high priori road, and who sense that there may be some connection between limited claims and unlimited rewards." Northrop Frye (Contemporary Literature, 1968)

Sundry items making no coherent whole

I've added content to the following old posts:

• America's Critical-Thinking Movement in the 1930s & '40s
• Some quotations on facts
• John Albert Chadwick, WWI vet who left Cambridge logic for an Ashram

These old lines by Mike Royko seem timely:

I always believed that being a Cubs fan built strong character. It taught a person that if you try hard enough and long enough, you'll still lose. And that's the story of life. .... [a year later] Being a Cub Fan prepares you for life because everyone in life winds up a loser. Just check the cemetery. (Royko, 'A Farewell to Cubs' April 20, 1980, and 'When Ya Gotta Go' April 9, 1981, rpt. in For the Love of Mike: More of the Best by Mike Royko [University of Chicago Press, 2001], p. 35 & p. 40)

Leonard Nimoy explains the Spock pinch (the link is to the video for a 1969 CBC interview).

The BBC's list of 10 'lost' books worth our time.

The Guardian's 'top 10 philosopher's fictions'.

Pardon my crooked scanning of this image:

New Words in 1919 (from The New Republic, Oct. 1, 1919)

Hermann Broch (c. 1939-1948): 'When living in a twilight haze, one cannot distinguish between the conditions of nature and those of culture. One's attitude towards culture, then, resembles that of animals towards nature.'* (Hermann Broch Massenwahntheorie: Beitrage zu einer Psychologie der Politik, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979], p. 69; trans. of 1st sentence: Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed, trans. author & Peter Jansen [University of Chicago Press, 2008], n. 456)

Roland Barthes (1984): 'Myth consists in turning culture into nature, or at least turning the social, the cultural, the historical into "the natural".' (Barthes, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, [NY: Hill & Wang, 1986; 1st published in French in 1984], p. 65)

C. D. Broad (1954):

[Aunt Julia's] cat for a great many years was a large tom, whom even I (who am inclined to be weak about cats) must admit to have been ugly, greedy, lecherous, and lacking in affection. She lavished good food on him .... She had named him Urijah .... Urijah survived his mistress for several years. He was treated with the same marked generosity by my cousin Ernest, who surely cannot have approved of his character, and died in extreme and unlovely old age. (Broad, 'Autobiography', The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp [NY: Tudor Publishing Company, 1959], p. 20)

James Lees-Milne (1942): '... Ronnie Norman, the eternal handsome schoolboy, noisily loquacious until he finds the conclusion to an argument, when he stops like an unwound clock.' (James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942-1954, ed. Michael Bloch, entry for Jan 12, 1942)

The 'Indiscreet charm of Beryl Bainbridge' by Philip Hensher.

Beryl Bainbridge in Coronation Street:



* Broch's above-quoted remarks in German: 'Wenn der Mensch sich im Dämmerzustand befindet, kann er nicht zwischen den Gegebenheiten von Natur und Kultur unterscheiden. Seine Einstellung gegenuber der Kultur ahnelt dann der des Tieres gegenuber der Natur.'

More quotations about facts

(Part I from last May)

G. E. Moore (1953): '"Facts" is a very ambiguous word, although it is so constantly used as if it were clear.' (Some Main Problems of Philosophy, p. 306)

Henry Philip Tappan (1844): 'By fact, we mean phenomena, — something which we know by observation merely. Facts are of two kinds: 1. Facts of the Senses, or external observation. 2. Facts of the Consciousness, or internal observation.' (Elements of Logic, p. 427)

William James (1907): 'The facts themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are.' (Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Lecture VI. Pragmatism's Conception of Truth)

W. R. Dennes (1932): 'Facts are events. ... [T]he facts propositions report are qualified and related events which occur and cease but are not true or false.' ('Fact and Interpretation', Studies in the Nature of Facts, vol. 14 of the University of California Publications in Philosophy [Berkeley: University of California Press]: 98)

L. Susan Stebbing (1930): 'A fact is not an event. ... A fact is anything that is the case. ... Facts simply are; they are neither true nor false. Only propositions can be true, or can be false.' (Modern Introduction to Logic, p. 36)

Talcott Parsons (1949): 'A fact is not itself a phenomenon at all, but a proposition about one or more phenomena.' (Structure of Social Action, Part 1, ch. 1, p. 41)

Henry S. Leonard (1957): 'Propositions, or states of affairs, are either true or false. If a proposition is true, it is called a fact. If it is false, it is said not to be a fact. Thus, facts are true propositions.' (Principles of Reasoning: an Introduction to Logic, Methodology, and the Theory of Signs, p. 47)

Bernard Bosanquet (1885):

English custom has always recognized 'fact' as to some extent a middle term between Thing or reality, and the knowledge which is in our heads. Fact is always conceived as relative to knowledge, whereas thing and reality rather imply independence of knowledge. ... [W]e regard fact as belonging, no doubt, to reality, but as existing for us by construction and especially by abstraction, as the embodiment of it in judgments conclusively shows. I have little doubt that most men would unhesitatingly affirm the existence of things apart from percipient intelligence, but if asked the same question about facts they would be puzzled and would probably decide in the negative. Unknown facts, although a simple process of reflection forces the notion of them on the mind, are felt to be a troublesome conception. Thus I think that common-sense recognizes the true nature of that (viz., fact) on which it chiefly relies, far more correctly than we admit if we confuse fact with thing and reality, or on the other hand with the unformed datum of sense. (Knowledge and Reality, pp. 45-6; [Emphasis added])

Sven Edvard Rodhe (1939): 'The view that the truth of a judgment lies in its correspondence with a fact meets with the difficulty that a fact qua such and nothing else cannot be conceived as given otherwise than in judgments. We never attain to more direct contact with facts than in our judgments, and, unless mutually contradictory judgments are accepted as equally true, the correspondence of the judgment with fact can only be interpreted as its agreement with other judgments. The demand for accordance between judgment and fact is a demand for accordance between judgments, since the answer to the demand for fact is no fact but judgments.' ('Correspondence and Coherence', Theoria [Jan., 1939]: 23)

W. V. Quine (1987): 'Or perhaps we settle for a correspondence of whole sentences with facts: a sentence is true if it reports a fact. But here again we have fabricated substance for an empty doctrine. The world is full of things, variously related, but what, in addition to all that, are facts? They are projected from true sentences for the sake of correspondence.' (Quiddities, p. 213)

Some quotations on facts (revised, Oct. 23, 2016)

(Part II is here.)

Bernard Mandeville (1732):

Facts are stubborn things.

(Mandeville, 'An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War' [1732])

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1831:

You cannot state any fact before a mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called. I wonder why facts were ever called stubborn things: I am sure they have been found pliable enough lately in the House of Commons and elsewhere. (Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk, Dec. 27, 1831) 

John Donne (1608):

Contemplative and bookish men must of necessity be more quarrelsome than others, because they contend not about matter of fact, nor can determine their controversies by any certain witnesses, nor judges. But as long as they go towards peace, that is Truth, it is no matter which way. (Biothanatos,'Preface', 1608)

Emily Dickinson (c. 1875?):

Opinion is a flitting thing, but truth outlasts the sun; if then we cannot own them both, possess the oldest one

 Cicero: res ipsa loquitur, the basis for the English phrase,

Let the facts speak for themselves. 

T. H. Huxley (1860):

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. (Huxley, letter to Charles Kingsley [September 23, 1860])

Coleridge (1830):

He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. (Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk, Sept. 21, 1830)

Charles Dickens (1854) -- Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times:

Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to Facts, sir  .... We hope to have, before long, a board of facts, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.

John Dewey (1933):

The feeling that instruction in 'facts, facts' produces a narrow Gradgrind is justified, not because facts in themselves are limiting, but because facts are dealt out as hard and fast ready-made articles. No room is left to imagination. Let the facts be presented so as to stimulate imagination, and culture ensues naturally enough. (Dewey, How we think : a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1933])

John Tyndall (1871):

Facts looked at directly are vital; when they pass into words half the sap is taken out of them. (Tyndall, Fragments of Science for Unscientific People [1871], p. 360)

Thomas Carlyle, 1836:

I grow daily to honour Facts more and more; and Theory less and less. A Fact it seems to me is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil; -- neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer had a hand in that. (Carlyle, letter to Emerson, April 29, 1836)

From the Dictionnaire de théologie dogmatique, liturgique, canonique, et disciplinaire: Volume 3 (1851):

Les faits ne parlent pas d'eux-mêmes. [The facts do not speak for themselves.]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1829:

The most important thing to remember is that all facts are already theory.

(Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, 1821/1829) [The original German:Das Höchste wäre, zu begreifen, daß alles Faktische schon Theorie ist.]

Johann Gustav Droysen (c. 1860-1880):

It is only in appearance that the 'facts' speak for themselves, alone, exclusively, 'objectively'. Without the narrator to make them speak they would be dumb.

(Droysen, Outline of the principles of history [Grundriss der Historik] trans. E. Benjamin Andrews [1897], pp. 52-53)  [The original German: Nur scheinbar sprechen hier die „Thatsachen" selbst, allein, ausschliesslich, „objectiv". Sie wären stumm ohne den Erzähler, der sie sprechen lässt.]

Joseph Conrad (1899): 'They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything.' (Lord Jim)

Pierre Duhem (1906): 'What the physical states as the result of an experiment is not the recital of observed facts, but the interpretation and the transposing of these facts into the ideal, abstract, symbolic world created by the theories.' (Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Part 2, ch. 4, p. 159)
 
Arthur Sidgwick (1914):

In either case what we call the 'fact' is only our opinion about the fact. (Elementary Logic, p. 237)

Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire (1917):

'The facts speak for themselves,' we say. But it is an illusion .... Facts do not speak. If the reader should answer and say, 'Well, at any rate they speak to me,' I would come out and meet him on the same ground and reply, 'Very well, then; so do they speak to me, but they do not say the same thing.' Facts are like the dolls of the ventriloquist and say what we want them to. (Darbishire, Introduction to Biology [1917], p. 9)

Aldous Huxley (1944):

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism. (Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 1944)

Talking Heads ('Crosseyed and Painless')

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
Facts don't stain the furniture
Facts go out and slam the door
Facts are written all over your face
Facts continue to change their shape

Observation statements are based on unconscious theorizing (says Sir George Lewis in 1849)

Sir George Cornewall Lewis, 'Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion' (1849):

It is true that even the simplest sensations involve some judgment: when a witness reports he saw an object of a certain shape and size, or at a certain distance, he describes more than a mere impression of his sense of sight, and his statement implies a theory and explanation of the bare phenomenon. When, however, this judgment is of so simple a kind as to become wholly unconscious, and the interpretation of the appearances is a matter of general agreement, the object of sensation may, for our present purpose, be considered a fact.

'Scientism' 12 - James, Dewey & Mueller

Twelfth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, & 14).

William James used 'scientism' in a few letters. The first such letter was addressed to his father's friend James John Garth Wilkinson (a Swedenborgian). James wrote to Wilkinson about the latter's book Greater Origins and Issues of Life and Death. In the letter (dated March 8, 1886), James wrote of his desire

...to protest against the sottish sect of "scientists" so far as it is a sect - which of course it is on an enormous scale.... Science carries its own remedy in its method and will slough off each successive crust of scientism that tries to harden over it, before it has had time to set. (James, letter to James John Garth Wilkinson [March 8, 1886], The Correspondence of William James, v. 6: 1885-1889, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley; [Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004], p. 125)

'Scientism' appears in two letters that James penned in later years, one of which was sent to James Mark Baldwin (in Jan., 1889) (Ibid., p. 477) about Baldwin's critique of James' 'Will to Believe'.

As was noted in an earlier post, James used the even more ungainly word 'scientificism' in his published work. Why didn't he use 'scientism' instead? Perhaps he thought it had associations with more conservative religious authors; or, perhaps, in an effort to play up the supposed folly of scientism, he opted for a more ridiculous, comical phrase.

I said in my 6th post of this series that John Dewey was taken for a paragon of scientism by some of his contemporaries. Further evidence of that tendency may be found in a review from 1949 by Roy Wood Sellars. In the course of discussing some lectures by R. B. Perry, Sellars said:

This is James' meliorism with fideism. God is the mightiest champion of the good. Not so much of this remains in Dewey, with his increased scientism and humanism. (Sellars, 'The Cook Lectures: "Characteristically American": A review of a distinguished philosopher's five discussions of fundamental aspects of American life, as recently presented to University audiencess', The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus [1949]: at 190)

Finally, in 1936, Gustav Emil Mueller (a Swiss-American philosopher) published Philosophy of Our Uncertainties, which included a chapter called 'The Four Fallacies of Scientism'. Mueller there said:

We now proceed to examine the mongrel scientism. Its position may be stated as follows: The universe is an object of scientific knowledge; what remains of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences. This maxim raises a legitimate issue against 'popular' pretensions to solve 'the riddle of the universe' in competition with scientific endeavors, and by wholesale and 'intuitive' methods of their own. We now turn to the criticism of the fallacies implied in it, if it is meant as a metaphysical position and not merely as a regulative, pragmatic maxim. (Mueller, Philosophy of Our Uncertainties [Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936], p. 70)

'Scientism' 11 - 'Scientism' in analytic philosophy

Eleventh in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, & 14).

The word 'scientism' has been in use among analytic philosophers at least since John Passmore used it twice in 1948 (in 'Philosophy and Scientific Method' and 'Logical Positivism III'). About ten years later, W. H. Dray accused Carl Hempel of scientism on p. 4 of his Laws and Explanation in History (1957).

More recently, we find the word appearing in the works of philosophers who were influenced by Wittgenstein. Recall that in post 10 of this series, I quoted a Jesuit philosopher, John Wellmuth, who saw in scientism an enemy of metaphysics. By contrast, Wittgensteinian critiques of scientism are more likely to see scientism, itself, as symptomatic of a residual attachment to metaphysics. For example, here's Warren Goldfarb in 1989:

It does make him [Wittgenstein] antiscientistic, against the smug and unexamined assurance that what wants explanation is obvious, and that scientific tools are immediately applicable. For Wittgenstein, scientism is just as misguidedly metaphysical as traditional, more transparently a prioristic, approaches. An immediate inclination to look to science for answers can in fact be an expression of a philosophical picture. Goldfarb, 'Wittgenstein, Mind, and Scientism', Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989)

Beyond the sphere of Wittgenstein interpretation, one finds several first-rate analytic philosophers with Wittgensteinian affinities disapproving of scientism. For instance, Michael Dummett, in the course of reviewing Noam Chomsky's Rules and Representations, observes that Chomsky's attitude 'contrasts not only with the widespread irrationalism of our day but with the equally repellent scientism usually opposed to it' (London Review of Books, 1981). In The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), Dummett says that scientism involves regarding the 'natural sciences as the only true channel of knowledge' (p. 35). That's from a chapter called 'Psychology and Scientism'.

Here's John McDowell in 1978:

But the notion of the world, or how things are, which is appropriate in this context is a metaphysical notion, not a scientific one: world views richer than that of science are not scientific, but not on that account unscientific (a term of opprobrium for answers other than those of science to science's questions). To query their status as world views on the ground of their not being scientific is to be motivated not by science but by scientism. (McDowell, 'Are Moral Imperative Hypothetical Imperatives?' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 52 [1978]: at 19)

In his View From Nowhere (1986), Thomas Nagel says:

Philosophy is also infected by a broader tendency of contemporary intellectual life; scientism. Scientism is actually a special form of idealism, for it puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it. At its most myopic it assumes that everything there is must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories like those we have developed to date—physics and evolutionary biology are the current paradigm—as if the present age were not just one in the series. (Nagel, View from Nowhere [1986], p. 9)

Here's Hilary Putnam in his 1990 Gifford Lectures, which were published as Renewing Philosophy (1993):

Analytic philosophy has become increasingly dominated by the idea that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective. To be sure, there are within analytic philosophy important figures who combat this scientism. Nevertheless, the idea that science leaves no room for an independent philosophical enterprise has reached the point at which leading practitioners sometimes suggest that all that is left for philosophy is to try to anticipate what the presumed scientific solutions to all metaphysical problems will eventually look like. (Putnam, Renewing Philosophy [1993], p. x)

In the Annual Lecture of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (Feb., 2000), which was published under the title 'Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline' (2000), Bernard Williams says, 'Scientism is, rather, a misunderstanding of the relations between philosophy and the natural sciences which tends to assimilate philosophy to the aims, or at least the manners, of the sciences.' In the Abstract for this paper, Williams wrote, 'Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding'.

In a metaphysics textbook, E. J. Lowe defined scientism as 'the doctrine that such legitimate metaphysical questions as there are belong to the province of the empirical sciences' (The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and Time, p. 5).

These philosophers take scientism to include a metaphysical project in which metaphysical questions will be answered by the modern, natural sciences. The metaphysical impulse thus survives in scientism at least insofar as the old metaphysical questions are still treated as well-formed foci for inquiry. Critics of scientism then divide into, on the one hand, those philosophers (e.g., Wellmuth and Lowe) who accept the metaphysical questions as legitimate but seek the answers outside the natural sciences and, on the other hand, those (e.g., Wittgensteinians) who reject the metaphysical questions themselves as involving conceptual confusions.

The analytic philosophers' use of 'scientism' seems more in accord with the 1870s use than the cold-war use. As noted, the cold-war use implied nefarious social and political agendas, such as Soviet communism. I conjecture that this use was more influenced by the French 'scientisme', which appeared often in critiques of positivism. French positivism incorporated a radical program for reforming society on purely scientific grounds. Its French critics meant to neutralize this agenda in their critiques of scientism. So, it's plausible that the cold-war use of 'scientism', with its dark foreboding about radical ideologies, developed partly from these French debates. By contrast, the 1870s use of 'scientism' indicated (explicitly) few, if any, fears about radical social upheaval. Instead, the focus of that use was squarely on the notion that old metaphysical methods were being displaced by the modern natural sciences, a shift that was thought to lead to some sort of materialism.

In post 9 of this series, I expressed surprise at the discovery that in the anglo-sphere, the 1870s accusations of 'scientism' were directed chiefly at members of the X Club and not so much at positivists. After all, consistent positivists should presumably take towards metaphysics the same approach as Wittgensteinians by exposing the illegitimacy of metaphysical questions and then ceasing to  engage in metaphysics. Weren't there any inconsistent positivists around at the time, positivists who could be 'caught out' in surreptitious metaphysical flights? Perhaps 19th-Century, anglo-critics of scientism didn't think so, taking the positivists to have succeeded in eschewing metaphysics; or perhaps these critics saw no point in accusing positivists of inconsistently harboring metaphysical commitments, preferring, instead, to direct their fire at the more influential X-Clubbers, some of whom clearly did tout metaphysical doctrines (materialism) that were allegedly based on the natural sciences. If so, then these 19th-Century critics seem to have been making an argument very similar to those advanced by Wellmuth and Lowe, the point of which was not to catch out positivists but was, instead, to take on the metaphysical scientists, the scientists who drew metaphysical results from natural-scientific evidence.

Update (Jan. 25): Here's another example of 'scientism' being used by an analytic philosopher. In a 1994 paper, Mark Johnston wrote:

Just as there is a certain kind of materialism which lives off the Cartesian legacy by taking over the Cartesian idea of the body as dumb matter, there is a certain kind of scientism which lives off the legacy of medieval theology by taking over the idea of the world's having a structure privileged independently of our cognitive activity, a structure which any able cognizer should want to know. (Johnston, 'Objectivity Refigured:Pragmatism Without Verificationism' in Reality, Representation, and Projection [Oxford University Press, 1994], p. 86)

'Scientism' 10 - Wellmuth and Owen

Tenth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I've found two definitions of 'scientism' by clerics in the mid-20th Century.

In my previous post on this topic, I said that some of the early, 19th-Century adopters of the term linked it to a hubristic view of modern science as holding the promise of a complete knowledge of reality.

Here's a passage that makes this hubristic sense explicit. It's from D. R. G. Owen's 1952 book, Scientism, Man, and Religion:

We may call it scientism or scientolatry. This peculiarly modern form of idolatry refuses to recognize the limitations of science and claims that its working principles can be used as universal principles, in terms of which the whole of reality can be explained and controlled. ... Scientolatry, therefore, claims that it can solve all problems 'scientifically.' (Owen, Scientism,Man, and Religion [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1952], pp. 20-21)

Owen was an Anglican clergyman and Provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He has here built a straw-man. Who ever claimed for science a capacity to give us the ability to 'control' everything?

Here's a better definition, which avoids imputing dreams of sweeping, comprehensive knowledge (let alone power) to those who stand for scientism. It was presented by John Wellmuth (S.J.) in his 1944 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University:

The word 'scientism', as used in this lecture, is to be understood as meaning the belief that science, in the modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real. (Wellmuth, S. J., The Nature and Origins of Scientism [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1944], p. 5)

This is not the hubristic version of scientism, for supporters of scientism are being taken to be confident about science only as the royal road to 'such knowledge as may be available' and not to an exhaustive knowledge of all reality.

The appearance in Wellmuth's definition of 'natural' is intriguing. Wouldn't the definition be better without it? Perhaps Wellmuth wanted a conception of scientism that could be applied to those religious people who allowed for divine revelation but who relied solely upon modern scientific methods for all other knowledge. If so, Wellmuth's conception of scientism positions it as a foe not so much of religion but, rather, of metaphysics.

Added (Jan. 16): I should add that my speculation re. Wellmuth's intended target was partly suggested by the focus of his Aquinas Lecture. He concentrates on medieval philosophers, esp. late medieval ones (inc. Scotus) and argues that the trend towards scientism was already under way before Descartes. It was initiated by medieval, Christian thinkers who accepted divine revelation but curtailed the prospects for metaphysical knowledge.

From George Henry Lewes' 'Spiritualism and Materialism (Part I)' (Fortnightly Review, New Series v. 19 [1876]: at 492):

The human consciousness is reflected in and guides every individual's acts. ... The Nation has no consciousness of Self. It is on this 'sense of personality' that Spiritualism relies. Nor am I disposed to underrate its value, since it was this which nearly converted me. But without pausing here to trace the genesis of this Self-consciousness, it is enough to point out that so far from being an initial principle, it is a very late product of evolution. It arises through the slowly-evolved consensus of the organism, and the syntheses of experience. This is shown in those abnormal cases familiar to students of mental pathology, in which the disturbance of the organic connexus leads to a 'double consciousness,' or to a 'changed personality.' The patient refuses to recognise his own voice and his own person as belonging to himself.

From Part 2 of Lewes 'Spiritualism and Materialism' [Fortnightly Review 'Spiritualism and Materialism (Part II)' (New Series v. 19 [1876]: at 715-716)]

We must protest against the interpretation of mental phenomena by movements in the brain, however important such movements may be as factors in the complex group of biological and sociological conditions. Although personal and selfish impulses are indispensable agencies in Moral Life, the attempt to reduce Moral Life to these impulses alone, without the co-operation of unselfish impersonal impulses, and the mighty influence of social conditions, is the Materialism against which Organicism protests. In a word, Organicism is distinguishable by its consistent carrying out of the hypothesis that the organic phenomena grouped under the terms Life and Mind are activities not of any single element, in or out of the organism, but activities of the whole organism in correspondence with a physical and a social medium. Just as it is the organism which lives, so is it the organism which moves and feels. ... When I say it is the man, and not the brain that thinks, I by no means suggest that the brain is not the crowning factor essential to the process. Without a Nervous System there could be nothing like what we know as Feeling; without a Brain or supreme nervous centre, there could be little or nothing of that complex grouping of sensitive states, which we know as Emotion, Thought, and Will. But Brain and Nervous System are only parts of a living organism, and their functions are only specialisations of the general properties of that organism; separate the Brain from the vital processes going on throughout the organism, and it is no instrument of Consciousness. The materialist asserts that the Brain feels and thinks, as the Stomach digests, and the Lungs breathe. I answer, Yes: but the Stomach does not digest, the Lungs do not breathe, except when these organs form parts of a living organism. An idea will arrest digestion, a little surplus of carbonic acid will arrest respiration, for the same reason that an arrested secretion will fill the mind with gloom, an excess of carbonic acid will stupefy it, a worm in the intestine will distract it, a plugged artery will obliterate it.

Lewes gave us the term 'emergence'.

'Scientism' 8 - Early uses (1870s)

Eighth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The English word 'scientism' came to be used in its modern sense in the 1870s. In these early uses, those who are said to be guilty of scientism are not positivists. Instead, the guilty parties are the supposed materialists, T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. Huxley and Tyndall were not, strictly speaking, materialists. Still, they did take the position that states of matter determine mental states and that the latter appear to be entirely dependent upon the former (so that there can be no independent mental substance). This stance sufficed at that time to secure the designation 'materialist'. Of course, Huxley and Tyndall were closely associated with Darwin's evolutionary theory, a theory which was taken by Huxley and Tyndall to imply a wholly physical origin of animal minds.

Some quick observations about these early uses:

• While the English word 'scientism' may yet have a French origin, its 1870s uses give no indication of a French source. 
• 'Scientism' was at first used primarily to signify a metaphysical doctrine (materialism); its epistemological dimension, the connotations that would implicate the positivists (and which are implied in the passage from Canon Barry [below]), came to the fore later in the 1870s. (The epistemological sense of 'scientism' is prominent in Dawson's 1877 attack on W. K. Clifford.)
• The following passages appeared in semi-popular magazines. Huxley and Tyndall, in addition to being scientists, were populizers of science. 'Scientism', then, was first used in pop-science contexts.
• In 1870, Huxley published Lay Sermons: Addresses and Reviews. I wonder if that title suggested to critics the idea that Huxley championed an alternative religion, which they then called scientism. The positioning of scientism as a religion is evident in the following quotations of Frothingham ('credo of a new religion') and Hecker ('votaries'). [Added, Jan. 10, 2015: Interestingly, in January of 1870, R. H. Hutton published a piece in the Spectator called 'Pope Huxley'.]

In 1871, D. R. Goodwin (a professor in Philadelphia's Episcopal Theological Seminary) published an article called 'Huxley's Writings' in The American Presbyterian Review. On its last page, we find this passage:

If, in the face of the increasingly triumphant exultations of modern scientism, in the face of its sneering sarcasms and insolent taunts, strangely mingled with insinuating appeals to a friendly and charitable judgment, any of the friends of Christian philosophy, morality and religion, are dismayed and despondent, let them be reassured by the patent fact, that with all its boasted progress towards the annihilation of the Christian Faith, modern speculation has not yet got one step beyond the positions of Benedict Spinoza and David Hume. (Goodwin, 'Huxley's Writings' American Presbyterian Review New Series, v. 3 [1871]: 302-333, at 333)

Here, 'scientism' needn't be given its more recent interpretation. Indeed, Goodwin might have taken the term's meaning, strictly speaking, to be no different from that of 'science'. Still, he at least associates the word with its more recent anti-religious implications.

'Scientism' next appears up in an 1872 book review in the Methodist Quarterly Review (Fourth Series, v. 24 [1872]: 339-342). The review is of Martyn Paine's Physiology of the Soul and Instinct, as distinguished from Materialism. The anonymous reviewer remarks that 'with modern scientism the problem is how to account for the system of things without a God' (p. 340). Here, the author seems to take atheism (or at least agnosticism) to be part of the meaning of 'scientism'.

In 1876, Frederick Frothingham used 'scientism' in his contribution to a Unitarian magazine. He asks,

Is it not so plain as to be well-nigh self-evident that the true Radicalism can have no sympathy with that spirit which, however it may claim the name of Radicalism, is not radical, and though boasting of scientism is not scientific,—which identifies itself with, and declares as scientific truths, what are yet, and perhaps for ages, if not always, must remain surmises, and proclaims these as the credo of a new religion?' (Frothingham, 'Our Work in the Light of Some Present Demands' The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine 6 [1876]: 117-133, at 128) 

Also in 1876, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker uses 'scientism' three times in his review of St. George Jackson Mivart's book Lessons from Nature as manifested in Mind & Matter. The word appears twice on the first page and once on the final page of the review.

On the first page, Hecker writes, 'Yet it is sadly true that the votaries of scientism are on the increase, and that Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, and Tyndall usurp ... a place lately held by Mill, Renan, Strauss, and Hegel' (Hecker, 'Mivart's "Lessons from Nature"' The Catholic World, 24 [1876]: 1-13, at 1). Hecker then dismisses the view that matter harbors the 'promise and potency of every form and quality of life'. (The quoted phrase [unattributed by Hecker] is from John Tyndall's 'Apology for the Belfast Address', Tyndall's defense of a very influential talk given in 1874 [which was ridiculed by James Clerk Maxwell in some poems].) Hecker then says, 'It is evident that scientism is more rigorously skeptical than rationalism or the materialism of the eighteenth century -- in a word, that it is supremely nihilistic' (Ibid.).

Finally, in 1877 Canon Barry rejects the 'scientism' of T. H. Huxley. Barry uses the term on p. 114 of A modern symposium. Subjects: The soul and future life, by Frederic Harrison [and others] and, The influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief, by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen [and others]. Interestingly, Barry applies the label not to the Comtean positivist Frederic Harrison but, instead, to the supposed materialist Huxley:

Mr. Harrison's earnest and eloquent plea against the materialism which virtually, if not theoretically, makes all that we call spirit a mere function of material organization ..., and against the exclusive 'scientism' which, because it cannot find certain entities along its line of investigation, asserts loudly that they are either non-existent or 'unknowable,' is strong, and (pace Prof. Huxley) needful. (Barrry, A Modern Symposium [1877], p. 114)

Incidentally, the first use that I've found of 'scientism' in a literary context is in George Bernard Shaw's marathon 1921 play (90 000 words long), Back to Methuselha, which includes this line: 'On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid.'

'Scientism' 7 - Dawson on Clifford (1870s)

Seventh in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I've found an 1877 piece called 'Scientism' in a Canadian magazine. Here's a passage from the opening paragraph of 'Scientism' by S. E. Dawson (1877):

Although the word we have placed at the head of this paper [scientism] is not to be found in that repertory of neologisms, Webster's Dictionary, it is one nevertheless much needed concisely to denote a phase of thought which has seized upon the current literature of the day and is imposing its one-sided truths upon the world as a complete system of philosophy. Precisely as the sacerdotalist would compel all belief and duty to bow before his supernatural authority, so the professor would narrow the whole field of truth by ignoring or repudiating every belief and duty which is not commensurate with his methods. Naturally, there is bitter war between these two classes of thinkers, and the scientist, having found a suitable pulpit in the Fortnightly Review, deals out his monthly modicum of denunciation and sneers at the religious faith of others with the arrogance of a mediaeval prelate; and, in truth, considering how short a time it is since the scientists have got control of the leading channels of thought, it is amazing how quickly they have attained to the fullest measure of dogmatism ever reached by their antagonists during the many centuries of their domination. Apt scholars, as many of them are, in dogmatism, they have imitated also the unnecessary offensiveness of by-gone ages, and whether it be Mr. Morley, spelling God with a little 'g,' or Professor Clifford, imputing 'immorality' to everybody not belonging to his school, one can hardly take up a number of the Fortnightly without being struck with some instance of this literary brutality, showing how little the apostle, even of the new evangel of 'sweetness and light,' has been able to charm the native fierceness of the scientific Philistine. When the 'Great Being' — the 'Goddess Humanity' of Comte, or 'Man' of Professor Clifford — (all with capital letters) is duly installed, and society is reorganised on the most advanced principles of Sociology, we fear that the 'hierarchy of science' will be found as intolerant of heresy as their sacerdotal prototypes. (Dawson, Belford's Monthly Magazine 3 [1877]: 903-920, at 903)

W. K. Clifford is the main focus of Dawson's ire. A few pages on, Dawson has this to say against Clifford's epistemology:

It is, however, assumed too readily that, in scientific matters, we believe only upon demonstration, whereas in fact men receive the chief part of their knowledge upon authority alone. There are very few who have gone over the proofs of the heliocentric theory in astronomy, and the reasoning upon which it is based is beyond the powers of many, but yet it is believed contrary to the evidence of our senses, solely upon the authority of a few. Not one thousandth part of our daily working beliefs are actually verified. We are always ready to give faith to the chemist, biologist or geologist, working out results in their special spheres. Professor Clifford himself is incessantly using such phrases as 'Huxley has shown,' 'Tyndall has said,' 'Darwin has taught,' 'Haeckel has demonstrated.' He is willing enough to accept authority and to lend faith to those distinguished specialists, not only in their demonstrations, but in their metaphysical theories upon these demonstrations. (Ibid., at 906)

'Scientism' 5 - Vienna Circle and Thomists (cold war)

Fifth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Already in 1951 we find a Vienna Circle positivist (and physicist-philosopher) reacting against claims about 'scientism'. Philipp Frank wrote:

All of these groups have attempted to limit science to the collection of material and to enforce a 'philosophical interpretation' which supports the 'way of life' which they regard as a 'good' one. For this reason, they will insist upon an autonomous philosophy that will provide decisions where science, in the narrower sense, has reached a stalemate. Organizations like the Roman Church or the Third Reich in Germany [yes, he just did that] have denounced in the strongest possible terms the claims of 'active positivism' or, as Maritain puts it, of 'scientism' to discuss the high-level generalizations of science in scientific terms. We find the same attitude toward 'active positivism' in the announcements of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. They require positively a philosophy which is to control scientific work. (Frank, 'The Logical and Sociological Aspects of Science', Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 80 [1951]: at 28-29)

In his Ransoming the Time (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941), Jacques Maritain had written about 'the pseudo-metaphysics of scientism' (p. 54). Maritain had been condemning scientism in his French works as far back as 1910 (in 'La science moderne et la raison', Revue de philosophie) though I don't think he used the term 'scientisme' that early. According to James Schmidt, Maritain used 'scientisme' in books published in 1927 and 1936.

Étienne Gilson's Elements of Christian Philosophy (Doubleday, 1960) has a section titled 'Materialistic Scientism', a view that, he says, is exemplified by Marxism (p. 94).

Update (Dec. 21): Frank's rhetorical strategy is interesting. Against the Cold War tendency to place scientism in the same camp as Marxism, Frank places scientism (or active positivism) in opposition to this ideology as well as to traditionalist and far right outlooks. His reply is similar to that of Seymour Martin Lipset (quoted by Tommi Uschanov in a comment on my 4th post in this series). It's also interesting that Frank doesn't actually speak in terms of ideologies; instead, he confines himself to claims about the observed behaviour of identified 'groups' and 'organizations'.

'Scientism' 4 - Brunner, Mills, Havel (cold war)

Fourth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I've found more mid-20th-Century uses of 'scientism'.

First, there is this passage from Emil Brunner's Gifford Lectures (1947-48):

Science and art serve men best if they remain true to their own laws. They must be 'autonomous'. But if this autonomy is ultimately final it cannot but degenerate into sterile inhuman intellectualist 'scientism' and into l’art pour l’art aestheticism. If however their autonomy is understood as theonomy they keep their independence and yet are united to natural life and ethical principles by a unity standing above all of them.

It looks like Brunner dropped 'scientism' from the book that was drawn from his Gifford Lectures. The book in question is Christianity and Civilisation (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948). Interestingly, the latter portions (at least) of that book (beginning at p. 85) echo some of the themes connected with other mid-20-Century uses of 'scientism'. For instance, Brunner mentions Comte and Spencer several times and says that liberalism degenerates and leads to collectivist tyranny (pp. 139-140). Brunner discusses fascist and communist forms of totalitarianism and sees both as threats to individualism and freedom. It was in that context that he had (in his lectures) used the word 'scientism'.

'Scientism' appears once in C. Wright Mills' 1959 book The Sociological Imagination:

In the meantime, philosophers who speak in the name of science often transform it into ‘scientism,’ making out its experience to be identical to human experience, and claiming that only by its method can the problems of life be solved. With all this cultural workmen have come to feel that ‘science’ is a false and pretentious Messiah. (Mills, The Sociological Imagination [Oxford University Press,1959], p. 16)

Finally, the mid-20th-Century, Cold War linkage of scientism and Marxism resurfaces in this 1992 piece by Vaclav Havel. In it, Havel says,

The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different forms, that the world -- and Being as such -- is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance and developing from the Enlightenment to socialism, from positivism to scientism, from the Industrial Revolution to the information revolution, was .... an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms and statistical averages. It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations of reality, an era in which the goal was to find a universal theory of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its prosperity. Communism was the perverse extreme of this trend. (Havel, New York Times [March 1, 1992])

'Scientism' 2 - Sample of uses (cold war)

Second in a series of fourteen posts (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Norman Foerster (1937):

By a belief in scientism I mean a more or less exclusive devotion to the methods, mental attitudes, and doctrines appropriate to science, ordinarily culminating in some form of naturalistic speculation. (Foerster, The American State University: Its Relation to Democracy [University of North Carolina Press, 1937], p.116)

Hans Morgenthau (1946):

The failure of the dogmatic scientism of our age to explain the social and, more particularly, political problems of this age and to give guidance for successful action calls for a re-examination of these problems in the light of the prerationalist Western tradition [p. 9]. ... Scientism assumes that the significance of nature and society for man exhausts itself in isolated sequences of causes and effects [p. 124] .... The quest for the technical mastery of social life, comparable to his mastery over nature, did not find scientism at a loss for an answer: the fundamental identity under reason of physical nature and social life suggested identical methods for their domination. ... There is only one truth, the truth of science, and by knowing it man would know all [pp. 125-6]. (Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, [University of Chicago Press, 1946])

Eric Voegelin (1948):

The scientistic creed ... is characterized by three principal dogmas: (1) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary. (Voegelin, 'The Origins of Scientism', Social Research 15 [1948]: 462)

Michael Polanyi (1958):

Modern scientism fetters thought as cruelly as ever the churches had done. It offers no scope for our most vital beliefs and it forces us to disguise them in farcically inadequate terms. Ideologies framed in these terms have enlisted man's highest aspirations in the service of soul-destroying tyrannies. (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge [University of Chicago Press, 1958], p. 279)

C. S. Lewis (some time between 1946 & 1963):

'Scientism'—a certain outlook on the world which is usually connected with the popularization of the sciences, though it is much less common among real scientists than among their readers.  It is, in a word, the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it—of pity, of happiness, and of freedom. (Lewis, 'A Reply to Professor Haldane' in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories [Mariner Books, 2002]. at pp. 76-77; Lewis's 'Reply' was first published in 1966; posthumous)

'Scientism' 1

First in a series of fourteen posts (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The use of the English term 'scientism' echoes that of the French 'scientisme'. Both words have primarily been terms of abuse, implying the application of scientific methods beyond their proper domain. Peter Schöttler has traced the French phrase back to the 1840s. It seems to have arisen from disputes between Comtean positivists and more conservative, religious authors. Some of the Comteans embraced the label. Here, for instance, is Felix le Dantec in 1911:

I believe that science ... alone can solve all the issues that have meaning ... and I think it will penetrate to the mysteries of our emotional life and explain to me even the origin and structure of hereditary anti-scientific mysticism cohabiting with the most absolute scientism. But I am also convinced that men posed many questions that mean nothing."  (le Dantec, Le chaos et l'harmonie universelle [F. Alcan, 1911])

[Please excuse my linguistic feebleness, but the above rendering is my Google-assisted translation of le Dantec's French.]

Aided by Google's Ngram, James Schmidt has charted the early development of the English 'scientism', noting a spike in its use around 1920. Schmidt identifies two sources of this increase. One was a 1919 theological book by Charles Gray Shaw’s (The Ground and Goal of Human Life [reviewed in The Personalist 4 (1923): 67-9]). Shaw takes Comte and Spencer to be paradigms of scientism (Comte's name appears more than twenty times in the index of Shaw's book). Here's Shaw: 'The attempt to socialize science or to make sociality scientific has been the undoing of scientism; so that who can deny that Comte and Spencer have made scientism appear silly?' (p. 177) Shaw regarded scientism as being inimical to 'individualism'. In one of his earliest uses of 'scientism' in the above-linked book, Shaw says,

The scientism which now attempts to interpret the world for man had its beginning with the inception of modern thought; but it was not until the science of the organic world advanced beyond the study of the inorganic that scientism gained the upper hand and drove the self from the world of things. How such scientism arose and how it achieved its victory over the self, must now become the subject of analytical investigation

Shaw's writing abounds in ill-defined abstractions, including not only scientism but, also, its putative contraries (among which are 'aestheticism' and the 'spiritual').

Schmidt says that the other source of 'scientism's' 1920 spike was an article by Charles Cestre on the plight of labourers. Cestre's use seems idiosyncratic, though he, too, sees a tension between scientism and individualism. (Here's Part II of Schmidt's history of 'scientism'.)

Among the most prominent uses of 'scientism' before 1950 was that of Friedrich von Hayek. In his 1942 paper, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I', Hayek introduced the term as follows:

To preclude any misunderstanding on this point we shall, wherever we are concerned, not with the general spirit of disinterested inquiry but with that slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, speak of 'scientism' or the 'scientistic' prejudice. Although these terms are not completely unknown in English, they are actually borrowed from the French, where in recent years they have come to be generally used in very much the same sense in which they will be used here. It should be noted that, in the sense in which we shall use these terms, they describe, of course, an attitude which is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed. The scientistic as distinguished from the scientific view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it. (Hayek, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I' Economica 9 [1942]: 269 [italics added])

I've omitted Hayek's three footnotes from the above passage. In one of them, he cites two French sources re. the use of 'scientisme'. One of them is J. Fiolle's Scientisme et Science (Paris, 1936). The other one is André Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (4th ed.).