"The dismal science" is a derogatory alternative name for economics devised by the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century. The term is an inversion of the phrase "gay science", meaning "life-enhancing knowledge", a reference to the technical skills of song and verse writing. This was a familiar expression at the time, and was later adopted as the title of a book by Nietzsche in The Gay Science.
Famous quotes containing the words dismal and/or science:
“I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.”
—Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)