He demanded
summaries. He found he could not read an unending series of figures.
He embraced the man who made colored pictures of them. He found that
he really did not know one machine from another. He hired engineers to
pick them, and tell him how much they cost and what they could do. He
peeled off one burden after another, as a man will take off first his
hat, then his coat, then his collar, when he is struggling to move an
unwieldy load.
3
Yet curiously enough, though he knew that he needed help, he was slow
to call in the social scientist. The chemist, the physicist, the
geologist, had a much earlier and more friendly reception.
Laboratories were set up for them, inducements offered, for there was
quick appreciation of the victories over nature. But the scientist who
has human nature as his problem is in a different case. There are many
reasons for this: the chief one, that he has so few victories to
exhibit. He has so few, because unless he deals with the historic
past, he cannot prove his theories before offering them to the public.
The physical scientist can make an hypothesis, test it, revise the
hypothesis hundreds of times, and, if after all that, he is wrong, no
one else has to pay the price. But the social scientist cannot begin
to offer the assurance of a laboratory test, and if his advice is
followed, and he is wrong, the consequences may be incalculable.
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