76 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



UTILITAEIAN SCIENCE.* 



By President DAVID STARR JORDAN, 



LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY. 



|~T falls to my lot to-day to discuss very briefly, in accordance with 

 -*- the program of this congress, some of the common features of 

 utilitarian science, with a word as to present and future lines of investi- 

 gation or instruction in some of those branches of the applications of 

 knowledge which have been assigned to the present division. 



Applied science can not be separated from pure science, for pure 

 science may develop at any quarter the greatest and most unexpected 

 economic values, while, on the other hand, the applications of knowl- 

 edge must await the acquisition of knowledge, before any high achieve- 

 ment in any quarter can be reached. For these reasons, the classifica- 

 tion adopted in the present congress, or any other classification of 

 sciences into utilitarian science and other forms of science, must be 

 illogical and misleading. Whatever is true is likely sometime to 

 prove useful, and all error is likely to prove sometime disastrous. 

 From the point of view of the development of the human mind, all 

 truth is alike useful and all error is alike mischievous. 



In point of development pure science must precede utilitarian 

 science. Historically, this seems to be not true ; for the beginnings of 

 science in general, as alchemy, astrology and therapeutics, seem to have 

 their origin in the desire for the practical results of knowledge. Men 

 wanted to acquire gold, to save life, to forecast the future, not for 

 knowledge's sake, but for the immediate results of success in these 

 directions. But even here accurate knowledge must precede any suc- 

 cess in its application, and accuracy of knowledge is all that we mean by 

 pure science. Moreover, as through the ages the representatives of the 

 philosophies of the day, the a priori explanations of the universe, were 

 bitterly and personally hostile to all inductive conclusions based on the 

 study of base matter, men of science were forced to disguise their 

 work under a utilitarian cloak. This is more or less true even to this 

 day, and the greatest need of utilitarian science is still, as a thousand 

 years ago, that this cloak should be thrown off, and that a larger and 

 stronger body of workers in pure science should be developed to give 

 the advance in real knowledge on which the thousands of ingenious and 

 noble applications to utilitarian ends must constantly depend. 



It is a fundamental law of psychology that thought tends to pass 

 over into action. Applied science is knowledge in action. It is the 



* Address at the International Congress of Arts and Science, St. Louis, 

 September, 1904. 



