226 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



nology were written down and so preserved and transmitted, 

 a point that in Egyptian history is associated with the work of 

 the architects and engineers who carried out the great build- 

 ings of the Old Kingdom, including the Pyramids. In the 

 later Greek period, from 400 B.C. to 200 b.c, the relation of 

 science to philosophy emerged; logic and mathematics evolved 

 as the tools of thought; and the epistemology of science de- 

 veloped. In the seventeenth century, the experimental 

 method was discovered; and the development of the body of 

 valid ideas, which today we term science, proceeded apace. 



At the beginning of the twentieth century, the experi- 

 mental method of science ^vas found to be directly applicable 

 to the control of industry, and from that application has come 

 the rapid growth in the efficiency of production that has 

 marked the present age. 



But the path of science is not ended. As Joan Evans says: 

 "The present should retain its true proportion ... a mo- 

 ment between an infinite past and a hurrying future." In 

 that future, there are already signs of a new field for the 

 application of the methods of science, the field of the social 

 sciences— sociology, economics, and politics. 



The application of the methods of science to the social 

 sciences is by no means novel. Plato and Aristotle discussed 

 it and, indeed, regarded the understanding of the principles 

 of political economy as the chief end of scientific investiga- 

 tion. Francis Bacon laid down the application of science to 

 politics as the principal object of the pursuit of knowledge. 

 The philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 

 based much of their sociological and economic doctrines upon 

 the supposed nature of scientific knowledge. Two of those 

 philosophers, holding very different political views, Herbert 

 Spencer and Karl Marx, founded all their sociological pre- 

 cepts upon what they believed to be the teachings of science. 



A. N. Whitehead, however, points out that the whole 

 tradition of the thinkers who have written on sociology and 

 political philosophy is warped by the assumption that each 

 generation follows the practices of its fathers and transmits 



