SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ART 2) 
tive government may be prevented from ignoring it and substi- 
tuting the rationalism of some little conscious class. 
This does not mean that a Government must always govern 
and adapt its laws to the level of the current feelings, desires and 
aspirations of the average man, giving him no lead or stimulus 
to higher rationality. Such a course would be to ignore that 
capacity for progress and that susceptibility to proximate ideals 
which are themselves implanted in the instincts of mankind. 
But it does require that a Government shall keep itself in the 
closest sympathy with the concrete feelings and ideas of the peo- 
ple, maintaining such contacts as shall enable its acts of policy 
to rank as substantially correct interpretations of the general will, 
not as the designs of a supreme governing caste or group of in- 
terests, pumped down through some artfully contrived electoral 
machinery so as to receive the false formal impress of ‘the gen- 
eral will.’ 
These reflections upon the nature of popular government may 
appear to have carried us far afield. But they have been no 
irrelevant excursion. For upon our view of the nature and meas- 
ure of rationality to be imputed to the processes of reform or prog- 
ress in national life must depend our view of the part which can 
be played by the social sciences which are invoked as the chief 
instruments of conscious collective conduct. 
Recognising that social progress in all its departments re- 
mains always a collective art, inspired and sustained by creative 
impulses which owe neither their origin or their validity to sci- 
ence, we shall regard the social sciences as servants rather than 
directors of social progress. We shall be concerned to ask, 
What are the proper and particular services such sciences can 
render? How can they assist a people in utilising its human and 
natural resources for the attainment of the best conditions of 
human life, individual and social? 
This work is written as a partial and illustrative answer to 
these questions. Taking industry, that department of social 
conduct most susceptible of the quantitative measurement which 
is the instrument of science, we have endeavored to construct 
and apply an organon of human valuation to its activities and 
achievements. Recognising that industry, regarded from the 
$5¢