Man In The Modern World

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL
isolation from other aspects of human activity and its consequent
greater entanglement with problems of value. It must therefore work
out its own technique and its own methodology, just as natural science
had to do after Bacon and the eager amateurs of the seventeenth
century had glimpsed natural science as a new form of human activity.
Let us not forget that the working out of this technique and this
methodology by natural science took a great deal of time and is indeed
still progressing. During the growth of modern science, the amateur
has been largely replaced by the professional; university laboratories
have been supplemented by governmental and industrial institutions;
whole-time research has become a new profession; the team has in
many types of work replaced the individual; co-operative group
work is beginning; and the large-scale planning of research is in the
offing.
Finally, the enormous growth of applied science has had effects of
the utmost importance on pure research. It has done so partly by
providing new instruments which would otherwise have been unavail-
able ; one need only instance the gifts of the wireless industry not only
to pure physics but to such unexpected branches of science as nervous
physiology. And partly by suggesting new lines of research, the needs
of wireless have again revealed new facts concerning the upper atmo-
sphere, while the study of plant pests and human diseases has brought
to light new modes of evolution.
We need have no fear for the future of social science. It too will
pass through similar phases from its present infancy. By the time that
the profession of social science, pure and applied, includes as many
men and women as are now engaged in natural science, it will have
solved its major problems of new methods, and the results it has
achieved will have altered the whole intellectual climate. As the
barber-surgeon of the Middle Ages has given place to the medical
man of to-day, with his elaborate scientific training, so the essentially
amateur politician and administrator of to-day will have been re-
placed by a new type of professional man, with specialized training.
Life will go on against a background of social science. Society will
have begun to develop a brain.
II. THE BIOLOGICAL ANALOGY
Writers and philosophers have often attempted to illuminate human
affairs by means of biological analogies. Shakespeare, in Coriolanus,
drew the analogy between the human body and the body politic in
Menenius' speech on the body and its members. Herbert Spencer's
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