VALUES IN SCIENCE « 



W. H. Jordan, D. Sc, 

 Diirctor Xnr York State Experhiunl Slulinn. 



My theme touches the apologetics of applied science. Whatever 

 may be the attitude of scholars who measure values in knowledge from 

 their large and true proj)ortions, we are often made to feel that in the 

 academic world, as well as in the social, many regard science in the 

 abstract as of noljle blood, science in use as plebeian. There is no 

 question, I think, but that certain distinctions of "caste" in the 

 domain of knowledge still persistently cling to some of our institutions 

 of learning, fostered perhaps bj'^ that dogmatism among educators, not 

 yet wholly extinct, which is said to have denied at one time the priv- 

 ileges of morning chapel exercises to students of science in one of our 

 foremost American colleges. It would be interesting to know whether 

 tlie Divine Mind sympathized with the view that a study of His mate- 

 rial world constituted a sufficient reason for debarring a human soul 

 from His worship! In some colleges and universities, both in this and 

 other lands, a young man seeking to choose a life work as an investi- 

 gator or teacher would even now be advised earnestly that a study of, 

 and search for, principles in the abstract establishes a man on a plane 

 higher than he can reach if ho devotes himself to knowledge in its 

 applied or utilitarian relations. 



The judgments of the class room and laboratory affect the verdicts 

 of the drawing room. Mrs. A., whose husband is announced to have 

 solved the problem of the loss of nitrogen from manure, would be 

 decidedly eclipsed by Mrs. B., who could declare with wifely pride 

 that her husband worked out the constitution of some complex organic 

 product. Possibl}' there are grades of intellectual and social standing 

 within the limits of applied science itself, so that the more common 

 the object toward the study of which scientific knowledge and research 

 are directed, the less the prestige therebj^ accruing in certain quarters. 

 In fact, it is probably true that the social standing of a scientific effort 

 is more fully determined by the nature of the utilities it is to serve 

 than by comparisons based upon the terms " pure " and ''" applied." 



« Presidential address delivered at the Washington meeting of the Society for the 

 Promoticjn of Agricultural Science. 



625 



