The “usefulness” of science

ABSTRACT IN your interesting article on “The New Century” in the January 3 number of NATURE, I notice that you endorse M. Lévy's account of the usefulness of “useless” studies and even

proceed to suggest that “all our progress has come from the study of what was useless at the time it was studied.” Now while fully agreeing with your main argument, it seems to me that this

goes too far. Certainly M. Lévy's illustrations do not prove it. For it so happens that the early astronomical observations, to which he appeals, so far from being useless in the eyes

of those who made them, were believed to be of the utmost practical importance. In fact, it may be doubted whether the study of astronomy has ever again been prosecuted in so directly

utilitarian a spirit as in its infancy. For, quite apart from the practical need of determining the succession of the seasons, which M. Lévy seems to have strangely overlooked, it was

generally believed that the observation of the heavenly bodies was “useful” as a method of forecasting terrestrial events. Astronomy was the offspring of astrology, and assiduously practised

because no distinction had yet been made between those heavenly bodies which made great practical differences to human affairs, like the sun and the moon, and those whose influence was

inappreciable. Furthermore, it must be remembered that these same bodies were regarded as literally deities of the highest order, so that their observation was a religious rather than a

scientific act. This veneration of the heavenly bodies, moreover, persists throughout Greek science, and even Aristotle regards them as composed of a purer and diviner material than anything

“sublunary.” So that, when he advocates the “useless” θεωρία of astronomy and mathematics as the highest exercise of human faculty, he does _not_ mean “seek knowledge for its own sake,” but

rather “raise yourself to the contemplation of what is nobler and diviner than anything earthly.” For the eternal and immutable truths of mathematics also were regarded as being of more

than human validity. Hence it seems a mistake to call these primitive researches useless because we do not happen to believe in the use they were supposed to have. Access through your

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AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Corpus Christi College, Oxford F. C. S. SCHILLER Authors * F. C. S. SCHILLER View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE SCHILLER, F. The “Usefulness” of Science. _Nature_ 63, 298–299 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/063298e0

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