Science presents a comprehensive and exclusive explanatory scheme that claims to describe and map reality, but the reality apprehended by way of science seems always short of its claims for itself and for the way we are to think about the world. Science sets itself up against myth. It is not, however ultimately, the fanciful and rhetorical claims to omnipotence that makes science mythic, but the transformative power of its totalizing claim on our imagination that makes Science yet another myth. The Science Myth found its way into law with the help of Christopher Columbus Langdell who held that law too was a science. This late 19th century conception of law, itself the work of mythic thinking, has today worn thin and frail.
Every discipline is an iceberg.
What we see above the surface is a prosaic and instrumental methodology, a body of abstract theory, a language of proposition and description, and a group of organized practitioners. Every discipline carries, beneath the surface, an idealized configuration of itself, which fuels a continuing struggle in the discipline between those who seek to maintain the disciplines boundaries and its present surface configuration and those who appeal to an underground version of the discipline's ideal, its antinomian vision of itself. Until Law and Science, one or the other, aid in the final destruction of human consciousness, they will constitute two limited, however dazzling methodologies for investigating truth claims. Science and Law, titans of modern mythlessness, whatever their claim as monomyths in a mythless world, must take their place in a polytheistic world, a world of many myths. Monomyths create and destroy, they shape meaning, ideals, and visions, and in doing so, they become awesome and dangerous.