I was surprised that Google only turned up one instance of the sentence "Science is the methodical pursuit of knowledge". When I articulated it for myself, I certainly didn't think that I (or, as it turns out, "ChrisM") was saying something original. So if anyone knows of a classic version of that dictum, please let me know.
The straight pangrammatical homologue is: politics is the mandated pursuit of power. But all depth in philosophy, as Wittgenstein said, is the depth of a grammatical joke. Here the joke might go as follows:
If science is the methodical pursuit of knowledge, politics is the mandacious pursuit of power.
Only a pangrammarian would get it, of course. Only if the word "method" immediately calls up "mandate" will "mandacious" have any meaning at all.
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