Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/741

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 725

it is universal in children, yet persists in few adults. It sur- vives adolescence in a certain number of social investigators like anthropologists, folklorists, economists, historians, psycholo- gists, etc. most of whom are so highly specialized as to have lost the instinct we desire for a general doctrine of social evolution. It survives also in a limited number of sociologists, many of whom are reluctant to be labeled with that title. Thus the dispersion and isolation of the sociologists, and the ignorance and unpopu- larity of the name, are due not so much to the hardness of the word, or the difficulty of the doctrine, as to the prevailing inability of the folk-mind to distinguish between science and socialism, between science and skepticism.

IV. Thus, owing mainly to the incompleteness and sterility of the social sciences, the unification of science is very far from being a visible reality, and consequently the influence of the scientific party is relatively slight in every country of the occi- dental world and least of all, perhaps, in Great Britain, with the possible exception of Spain and Venezuela. It was but the other day that the only high-level meteorological observatory of Great Britain was closed and the staff dispersed, the records ignored even unexamined and the apparatus offered for public sale all because the influence of the scientific party was not equal to securing for its support about 500 out of the 140 odd million pounds which constitute the annual national budget. In laudable over-estimate of the desire of other European govern- ments to possess meteorologists, the government of the Argentine Republic cabled to secure the staff of the Ben Nevis Observatory ; and, as they were in this partly successful, it may be that what has been lost to the British Empire by this calamitous misadventure is to be preserved for science. A measure of the relative weight exercised in the councils of the nation by the scientific and militar- ist parties is seen in the annual grant made by the central govern- ment to the collective university chests of Great Britain and Ire- land. This grant is about 100,000 per annum. That is about the sum expended in keeping in commission, for a year, a single first-class battleship. And if we add to this an allowance for de-