234 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE PEACTICAL VALUE OF PUKE SCIENCE 



By Professor THOS. H. MONTGOMERY, Jr. 



UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 



THKOUGH all ages men have asked, What is worth while? The 

 answer has been, at least from those not stupefied by pessimism, 

 that many things are worth the while : happiness, self-respect, health, 

 friendship, honor, wealth, all these are worth having, and any work 

 that helps to secure them deserves the undertaking. It is the old ques- 

 tion of what man should try to attain, and about it many a system of 

 philosophy has reared itself, though for the most part on shaking legs. 



Through this conflict of opinion we have come to pride ourselves 

 upon being practical, even to such an extent as to consider abnormal 

 any one who does not share this quality. To be practical means to be 

 able to turn knowledge to useful account, to make of it some rather 

 immediate application. With us Americans to be practical means too 

 often to make and save money, forgetting that money is only a tool. 

 Personally I would hold that man to be most practical who gets the 

 most happiness out of life. But at the present we are concerned only 

 with the question, that may seem a paradox, how can pure science be 

 a practical undertaking? 



Science in the strict sense, or pure science, is the search for the 

 explanation of things. It is not the collecting of statistics, nor the 

 cataloguing of them, nor the construction of systems, for however much 

 these operations may help science, they do not compose it. Science is 

 the light that points out what different phenomena have in common, 

 and establishes their origins and changes. To-day the term is often 

 taken in vain, as when we speak of pugilistic, tonsorial and domestic 

 science, which shows that the general idea of it is any special skill 

 or knowledge. But pure science, as strictly used, is much more than 

 either skill or knowledge, it is explanation without any thought of 

 immediate application to human needs. 



How, then, is pure science practical, when it avowedly seeks no 

 quick useful end? It is so, as its records show, by serving as the pio- 

 neer that makes possible utilitarian ends, it breaks a road through the 

 unknown for application to follow. For not until science has given 

 the explanation can we turn that explanation to use. And the exam- 

 ples that I shall proceed to relate show clearly that the pursuit of pure 

 science has made possible many of the benefits that we now enjoy. 



