And if the experience of natural science is any guide, then as the science of administration advances, we may reasonably expect it to take on an incr… - Charles A. Beard

If I were compelled to state in a single sentence the most significant contribution of our movement to modern civilization, I should say that it is the application of the idea of continuous and experimental research, found so effective in economic enterprise, to the business of public administration intimately and in a deep-thrusting sense, a contribution to the processes by which modern mankind is striving with all its resources to emancipate itself from the tyranny of rules of thumb and the blind regimen of nature, becoming conscious of its destiny as an all conquering power.

If this statement by Judge Cooley is true, and the authority for it is unimpeachable, then the theory that the Constitution is a written document is a legal fiction. The idea that it can be understood by a study of its language and the history of its past development is equally mythical. It is what the Government and the people who count in public affairs recognize and respect as such, what they think it is. More than this. It is not merely what it has been, or what it is today. It is always becoming something else and those who criticize it and the acts done under it, as well as those who praise, help to make it what it will be tomorrow.

The word science of administration has been used. There are many who object to the term. Now if by science is meant a conceptual scheme of things in which every particularity coveted may be assigned a mathematical value, then administration is not a science. In this sense only astro-physics may be called a science and it is well to remember that mechanical laws of the heavens tell us nothing about the color and composition of the stars and as yet cannot account for some of the disturbances and explosions which seem accidental. If, on the other hand, we may rightly use the term science in connection with a body of exact knowledge derived from experience and observation, and a body of rules or axioms which experience has demonstrated to be applicable in concrete practice, and to work out in practice approximately as forecast, then we may, if we please, appropriately and for convenience, speak of a science of administration. Once, when the great French mathematician, Poincaré, was asked whether Euclidean geometry is true, he replied that the question had no sense but that Euclidean geometry is and still remains the most convenient. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a science is, among other things, a particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning.