ABSTRACT
If now we turn to Politics, or the art of government, in order to consider how far it can secure the disinterested service of a science, we are confronted with greater difficulties. The science and the art are there so intricately bound together that it is difficult to distinguish theories and principles which claim to be generalisations from history from those which claim to be guides to good government. Though statistics and laws of averages are put to large use in real politics, incommensurables and imponderables are so prevalent that no student claims for his study the same measure of exactitude which many economists claim for theirs. When history was held to repeat itself or to move in cycles, some fairly accurate estimates of current tendencies and forecasts of the future for a nation, or a civilisation, seemed possible. But when the rule of an external Providence or a rigid internal destiny yielded to the idea of an unlimited development of human affairs, in which the ‘free will’ of man seemed to play a determinant part, the baffling nature of that factor interposed new obstacles to any ‘science’ of history. Nevertheless there appeared to be enough regularity in human nature and its environment to enable us to trace their general interactions as they went to the moulding and working of large-scale human institutions. The earliest students of political forms and theories in the rich laboratory of the Eastern Mediterranean found sufficient material for generalisations, some of which have stood the test of time. But the writings of even the ablest and most ‘disinterested’ of these thinkers show how deeply affected were their investigations into fact, their generalisations and their speculative judgments, by prevalent ideas rooted in emotion. If such great minds as those of Plato and Aristotle could not disentangle themselves from current Greek sentiment towards barbarians, slaves, mechanics, women, how could it be expected that modern political thinkers, from Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, to Rousseau and Hegel, Mill, Spencer, Bryce, should escape the emotional entanglements of their time and country in the pursuance of their ‘science’?
