There is more to this indictment. Science has been organized, though
very imperfectly, for research; it has been organized hardly at all for
social application and control. The notion that science can be used in
conserving the vital elements of order and at the same time facilitating
experimental and progressive change, is but beginning to walk about.
Indeed, the employment and direction of scientific ability in the
business of government is still looked upon as a doubtful procedure; to
say that the administration of municipal affairs, for example, is to be
given over to men trained in the social sciences rather than to men
artful in trapping votes with oratorical molasses, is still a venture
into the loneliness of heresy. Again let Bacon speak, who was
administrator and philosopher in one. “It is wrong to trust the natural
body to empirics who commonly have a few receipts whereon they rely, but
who know neither the causes of the disease, nor the constitution of
patients, nor the danger of accidents, nor the true methods of cure. And
so it must needs be dangerous to have the civil body of states managed
by empirical statesmen, unless well mixed with others who are grounded
in learning. On the contrary it is almost without instance that any
government was unprosperous under learned governors.”[76]
Plato over again, you say. Yes; just as “Greek philosophy is the dough
with which modern philosophers have baked their bread, kneading it over
and over again,”[77] so this vital doctrine of the application of the
best available intelligence to the problem of social order and
development must be restated in every generation until at last the world
may see its truth and merit exemption from its repetition.
VIII
The Asiatics of Europe
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