226 
WILLIAM E. CASTLE 
free from bias when they are weighing general questions and are 
adopting general principles which are to serve as constitutions 
of personal conduct for their daily lives. This is the essence of 
that academic atmosphere’^ which surrounds a university, and 
which means freedom from bias, and which is sometimes con- 
demned by men who call themselves ^ ^ practical, ” just because it 
does mean freedom from bias and does not permit of the decision 
of large questions on the basis of small, local and selfish interests. 
The academic atmosphere is friendly to thought, to inquiry, 
to- the extension of every field of knowledge, without pausing to 
inquire whether it is immediately useful. 
Benjamin Franklin, a self-educated man of genius, founded the 
oldest of the learned societies of America, whose official title 
is The American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia for 
the Promotion of Useful Knowledge. Franklin, apparently, 
thought to rule out all knowledge that was not useful, as those 
do today who would admit to educational programs only voca- 
tional studies. But if Franklin or his successors ever seriously 
attempted to exclude from consideration in his Society any 
branch of knowledge on the ground that it was not useful, they 
long ago abandoned the attempt. The two-day program of the 
Annual Meeting of the Society which I sat through two years 
ago in the Society’s little old building on historic Independence 
Square, with Ben. Franklin’s crude apparatus in glass cases 
round the wall and outside the noise of a great commercial 
city roaring by,- — that program coVered every subject under the 
sun, from the folk lore of primitive savage tribes and the philoso- 
phy of primitive Christianity, to the best methods of preventing 
erosion on sea-beaches, and the ultimate constitution of atoms. 
No man, however wise, can tell us what knowledge is useful 
and what knowledge is not or is not likely to be useful. Great 
industrial establishments are coming to appreciate this fact. 
They recognize the potential value of fundamental truth, however 
abstruse. For example the General Electric Company employs 
eminent physicists drawn away by high salaries from the labora- 
tories of our universities, for what purpose? To plan electrical 
machines or to devise new uses for electricity? No, to study the 
