THE PATH OF SCIENCE 233 



obtain popular support. A successful political leader must 

 tend, therefore, either to believe his own emotional appeal 

 or to become a cynic and to some extent a hypocrite if he 

 exerts that appeal without belief. It is this difficulty that 

 makes even the greatest democratic leaders seem insincere in 

 many of their actions. The appeal to emotion is unavoidable 

 if popular sanction is to be obtained, and yet their critics and 

 often they themselves in retrospect feel that appeal to be false 

 and unwarranted. For this reason alone the political arena 

 would seem to be unsuitable for the scientific man, and those 

 who believe most fully in the value of the scientific spirit 

 should be prepared to understand and sympathize with 

 leaders who must obtain general popular approval for their 

 actions. 



In practice the adoption of political methods controlled by 

 pure reason could only succeed if they involved a dictatorship 

 and the rule of the majority of the people by a small minority. 

 A realization of this is evident in some of the writings of those 

 scientists who advocate planning.* J. G. Crowther says that 

 "in crises the possession of power is more important than the 

 cultivation of intellectual freedom." f Crowther has evi- 

 dently forgotten Lord Acton's dictum based on the saying 

 of William Pitt: "Power corrupts, and absolute power cor- 

 rupts absolutely." 



At the present time, therefore, it seems that the many at- 

 tempts to frame a scientific theory that could guide political 

 action have been wholly unsuccessful. Political action, never- 

 theless, need not be arbitrary; the long-established funda- 

 mental principles remain that have been available to guide 

 human action through the ages. Truth and justice, mercy 

 to the weak, and understanding for the erring are principles 

 that require no formal justification. These are not the 



* For a full discussion of planning in relation to science, see J. R. 

 Baker, Science and the Planned State, London, George Allen 8: Unwin, 



1945. 



f J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science, p. 331, New York, 

 The Macmillan Co., 1941. 



