Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There is need for more science in politics and less politics in science.
It is what makes the reform process an art, not just a science. You have to develop a strategy that tells you what reform measures you should follow and in what sequence.
Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.
I have an idealistic view of science as a liberalising and progressive force for humanity.
I believe that politics takes a much different set of skills than science. Science is about getting to the truth. Politics is about what people think and how they react.
I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.
Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.
We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.
Politics is not an exact science.
The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.