PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

comparison between the decision, which he understands, and the facts,
which he organized.
4
For the physical sciences this change in strategic position began
slowly, and then accelerated rapidly. There was a time when the
inventor and the engineer were romantic half-starved outsiders,
treated as cranks. The business man and the artisan knew all the
mysteries of their craft. Then the mysteries grew more mysterious, and
at last industry began to depend upon physical laws and chemical
combinations that no eye could see, and only a trained mind could
conceive. The scientist moved from his noble garret in the Latin
Quarter into office buildings and laboratories. For he alone could
construct a working image of the reality on which industry rested.
From the new relationship he took as much as he gave, perhaps more:
pure science developed faster than applied, though it drew its
economic support, a great deal of its inspiration, and even more of
its relevancy, from constant contact with practical decision. But
physical science still labored under the enormous limitation that the
men who made decisions had only their commonsense to guide them. They
administered without scientific aid a world complicated by scientists.
Again they had to deal with facts they could not apprehend, and as
once they had to call in engineers, they now have to call in
statisticians, accountants, experts of all sorts.
These practical students are the true pioneers of a new social
science. They are "in mesh with the driving wheels" [Footnote: Cf. The
Address of the President of the American Philosophical Association,
Mr. Ralph Barton Perry, Dec. 28, 1920. Published in the Proceedings of
the Twentieth Annual Meeting.] and from this practical engagement of
science and action, both will benefit radically: action by the
clarification of its beliefs; beliefs by a continuing test in action.
We are in the earliest beginnings. But if it is conceded that all
large forms of human association must, because of sheer practical
difficulty, contain men who will come to see the need for an expert
reporting of their particular environment, then the imagination has a
premise on which to work. In the exchange of technic and result among
expert staffs, one can see, I think, the beginning of experimental
method in social science. When each school district and budget, and
health department, and factory, and tariff schedule, is the material
of knowledge for every other, the number of comparable experiences
begins to approach the dimensions of genuine experiment. In
forty-eight states, and 2400 cities, and 277,000 school houses,
270,000 manufacturing establishments, 27,000 mines and quarries, there
is a wealth of experience, if only it were recorded and available. And
there is, too, opportunity for trial and error at such slight risk
that any reasonable hypothesis might be given a fair test without