ESSAYS 487 



love of knowledge, the desire to fathom — as far as fathomable — the mysteries 

 of existence and consciousness, and the truly Hellenistic culture of " this main 

 miracle," the human self. All this our great men of science most thoroughly 

 understand and teach — at least to those fitted to receive it : though the grossness 

 of the materialistic uneducated herd of politicians and capitalists and commercial 

 men, and the enforced ignorance of the masses, too often compel them to base 

 their arguments for the study of science upon the rewards of " applied" science. 



It is to be feared, however, that even many scientific men themselves have 

 suffered from the absence of any really scientific education, of such an education 

 at school and in earlier university days in general science as would make them 

 visualise science as one mighty synthesis including not only physics and chemistry, 

 astronomy and geology and biology, but also psychology and ethics and social 

 science — a synthesis all alike to be studied with the same rigorous scientific 

 precision, and giving rise from its respective departments to branches of " applied 

 science" in industry and warfare, and to the "arts"— as in such cases we style 

 " applied science " — of the physician and surgeon, of the alienist, and of the states- 

 man or politician as he should be but usually or almost universally is not. A few 

 outstanding thinkers have fully realised this oneness of science and the univer- 

 sality of its sway from the study of gravitating masses and vibrating molecules to 

 the almost inextricably complicated phenomena of vast social organisms. Comte 

 — whatever one may think of his conclusions and results — realised that sociology 

 is, or should be, a science just as is astronomy, and can be effectively studied only 

 after due preparation in the less concrete sciences. J. S. Mill devoted one book 

 of his Logic to the scientific methods of inquiry specially suited to unravel these 

 complicated social phenomena : and Herbert Spencer built up a mighty system 

 of synthetic scientific philosophy, in which ethics and sociology were studied by 

 the help of and were based on the " laws " and training afforded by the physical 

 sciences, by biology, and by psychology. Notwithstanding, however, these great 

 examples of a past generation, it is to be feared that too few, even of our greatest 

 men in science, realise that sociology is an essential part of this vast scientific 

 synthesis : and I do not know whether any of them, even among the few who take 

 any active interest in " politics," ever give evidence of any greater knowledge of 

 or regard for science in the sociological sphere than does the ordinary citizen or 

 the common politician. However even epoch-making they may be in their own 

 departments of science, they are not necessarily even scientific in their attitude 

 to politics, simply because they have never received any instruction whatever in 

 social science, which — being in many respects the most vitally important of all 

 departments of science to us social units — has, by common consent, been regarded 

 as quite outside any scheme of general education, even if some of us be so very 

 advanced as to insist that physics and chemistry, and perhaps a very little biology, 

 be taught as regular school-subjects. 



Now, it seems to me to be a very peculiar and outstanding merit of the Labour 

 Party's program, as laid down in Labour and Social Reconstruction, that all its 

 proposals, present and future, are and are to be based on the scientific study of 

 social phenomena. I am not aware that any other political party-program has 

 ever been based on such study — obviously indispensable and essential though it is 

 — or that any leading statesman of the last half century has manifested any 

 practical consciousness of the teachings of such thinkers as Mill and Spencer 

 Indeed, it is doubtful whether 5 or even 2 per cent, of them have ever studied the 

 books of any such thinkers : and so it has been left to the Labour Party to insist 

 that you cannot build without reliable foundations, or steer without a compass. 



