Such language, when used to express the phenomenology of social and political behavior, gives a curious impression of being foreign to its subject matter. The impression of foreignness may be explained as follows. In all writing which has come to be regarded as wisdom about the human being, there is an undertone of the sardonic. Man at his best is a sort of caricature of himself, and even when we are eulogizing him for his finer attributes, there has to be a minor theme of depreciation, much as a vein of comedy weaves in and out of a great tragedy. The “great” actions of history appear either sublime or ridiculous, depending on one’s standpoint, and it may be the part of sagacity to regard them as both at the same time. This note of the sardonic is found in biblical wisdom, in Plato’s realism of situations, and even in Aristotle’s dry categorizing. It appears in the _Federalist_ papers,[166] as the authors, while debating political theory in high terms, kept a cagey eye upon economic man. Man is neither an angel nor any kind of disembodied spirit, and the attempt to treat him as such only arouses our sense of the ridiculous. The comic animal must be there before we can grant that the representation is “true.” The typical social science report, even when it discusses situations in which baseness and irrationality figure prominently, does not get in this ingredient. Every social fact may be serious, but not every social action is serious because action is not fully explainable without motive. It is this abstract man which causes some of us to wonder about the predications of an unhumanistic social science. The remedy might be to employ, except where the necessity of conceptualizing makes it difficult, something nearer the language of the biblical parable (one shudders to think how our bureaucrat would render “A sower went forth to sow”), or the language of the best British journalism. I have often felt that writers on social science might learn a valuable lesson from the limpid prose of the _Manchester Guardian_. There one usually finds statement without eulogistic or dyslogistic tendency, adequacy without turgidity. It is perhaps the nearest thing we have in practice to that supposititious reality, objective language. There is some truth in the observation of John Peale Bishop that, whereas American English is more vigorous, English English is far more accurate. A good reportorial medium will be, to a considerable extent, an English English, and it will reflect something of the English genius for fact.