Science and Citizenship
lost the instinctive desire for a general doctrine of social evolution. It survives also in a limited number of sociologists, many of whom are reluctant to be labelled with that title. Thus the dispersion and isolation of the sociologists, and the ignorance and unpopularity 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 sociology and socialism, between science and scepticism.
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 occidental world, and least important of all perhaps in Great Britain, with the possible exception of Spain and Venezuela. It is but the other day that the only high-level meteorological observatory of Great Britain was closed, and the staff dispersed, the records ignored even without examination, 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 one hundred and forty odd millions which constitute the annual national budget. In laudable over-estimate of the desire of other European Governments to possess meteorologists, the Government of the Argentine Republic cabled to secure the staff of the Ben
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