Scientific investigation, the activity of being a scientist, is mankind in search of the intellectual satisfaction which comes from constructing and exploring a rational world of related concepts in which every image recognized to be relevant 'fact' in the idiom of this inquiry is given a place and an interpretation. Its impulse is not to make a world, each of whose component images is welcome on account of the pleasure it gives or the moral approval it evokes, but to make a rational world of consequentially arranged conceptual images. The 'natural world' of the scientist is an artefact no less than the world of practical activity; but it is an artefact constructed on a different principle and in response to a different impulse. And, properly speaking, scientia is what happens when we surrender ourselves to this impulse for rational understanding; it exists only where this impulse is cultivated for its own sake unhindered by the intrusion of desire for power and prosperity, and only the shadow of it appears where the products of this engagement (the discoveries about the world) are what is valued, and are valued only for what can be contrived from them. Of course, desire and approval and even the expectation of pleasure have their place in the generation of this activity, but they do not enter into the structure of this universe of discourse as they do into the structure of the practical universe: pleasure is not the warrant of valid achievement, it is not even the ratio cognoscendi of valid achievement, but only the self-congratulation which comes with the belief that one has been successful in this intellectual undertaking.
(Michael Oakeshott, "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind," in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991], 488-541, at 506 [essay first published in 1959])
Note from KBJ: The so-called scientists who are pushing the global-warming hypothesis would do well to reflect on the nature of science, as captured by this paragraph by Oakeshott. They are seeking "power and prosperity" rather than knowledge for its own sake. Think of it as the politicization of science. Politicized science is not science at all; it is politics in the guise of science, or rather, politics living off the good name of science.
