Abstract
ADMIRABLE sentiments were expressed by the Prime Minister when proposing the toast of ‘The Royal Society’ at the anniversary dinner on Monday last. Readers of NATURE must be familiar with, and possibly weary of, our continual insistence upon the use of scientific knowledge in the service of the State and of scientific method in administration. It is encouraging, therefore, to find Mr. Ramsay MacDonald expressing himself in entire sympathy with the view that public administration without science may be little more than a collection of words and phrases which can never lead a nation to security and prosperity. We are glad to record the words in which he stated this conviction: “The Royal Society”, Mr. MacDonald said, “has stood pre-eminently for experimental knowledge, for the testing of every dogma whenever a competent witness arose to bring that dogma to the bar of reason and experiment. Until in our public life we can catch up the same spirit, the same rationality, the same conception of how truth is to be discovered and reality reached, and those who are engaged in public work and in government acquire the same frame of mind and adopt the same methods that the scientists adopt in their laboratories, government will be feeble, uncertain, and misleading. I make bold to offer the claim that science does not merely deal with the conception of the universe, with biochemistry, or with the conception of human nature, but that when science has claimed its full field, in all its width and length, it will claim to deal with governments and with administrations, and will assault and attack successfully those tremendously interesting and intricate problems of how to handle great masses of men, not by rule of thumb, not by the passing emotions of the day, but by a careful study of the permanent psychologies, emotions, leanings, and allurements of the human mind.”
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News and Views. Nature 126, 888–893 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/126888a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/126888a0