THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



APKXL, 1883. 



NATUBE AND LIMITS OF THE SCIENCE OF 



POLITICS. 



By Peofkssob SHELDON AMOS, LL. D. 



THE progress of the strictly physical sciences in modern times has 

 had a twofold influence on the advancement of those branches of 

 knowledge which deal less with physical than with moral, social, and 

 political facts. On the one hand, the exact methods and indisputa- 

 ble conclusions of the sciences concerned with matter have inaugurated 

 modes of study and inquiry which are believed to be of universal ap- 

 plication. On the other hand, the standard of rigorous logic in all 

 studies is so far exalted that those subjects of thought or investigation 

 which do not conform to identically the same standard as that main- 

 tained for the study of matter are thought to be not worth pursuing 

 with any regard to the claims of a severe logical process. This sort 

 of antipathy between the physical and the ethical regions of search 

 and argument has been intensified by the co-existence of two opposed 

 orders of minds, the ardently speculative and the persistently practi- 

 cal. The former are discontented with the notion of a so-called Sci- 

 ence of Politics, because of the complexity of the subject-matter, and 

 the intrusion, at all points, of such seemingly incalculable factors as 

 the will and passions of mankind. Practical statesmen, again, im- 

 mersed in actual business, and oppressed by the ever-recurring pres- 

 ence of new emergencies, almost resent the notion of applying the 

 comprehensive principles of science, and still more the conjectural use 

 of foresight, in respect of subjects which, for them, are in ceaseless 

 flux, and can, at best, only be safely and wisely handled by momenta- 

 rily adjusted contrivances. 



Between these two extreme classes lies all the large portion of so- 

 ciety composed of persons with minds less distinctly determined and 

 vol. xxii. 46 



