examples of inquiry that seem to afford
not the slightest justification in the way of eventual good to
mankind.[1]

[Footnote 1: It is only fair to say that literary studies have
been marked by more barren and fruitless investigations (purely
philological inquiry, for example) than have the physical sciences.]

PRACTICAL OR APPLIED SCIENCE. Thus far we have been
considering science chiefly as an activity which satisfies some
men as an activity in itself, by the aesthetic, emotional, and
intellectual values they derive from it. But a fact at once
paradoxical and significant in the history of human progress is
that this most impersonal and disinterested of man's activities
has been profoundly influential in its practical fruits.
The practical application of the sciences rests on the utilization
of the exact formulations of pure science. Through these
formulations we can control phenomena by artificially setting
up relations of which science has learned the consequences,
thus attaining the consequences we desire, and avoiding those
we do not.

The _direct_ influence of pure science on practical life is enormous.
The observations of Newton on the relations between a falling stone
and the moon, of Galvani on the convulsive movements of frogs' legs
in contact with iron and copper, of Darwin on the adaptation of
woodpeckers, of tree-frogs, and of seeds to their surroundings, of
Kirchhoff on certain lines which occur in the spectrum of sunlight,
of other investigators on the life-history of bacteria--these and
kindred observations have not only revolutionized our conception
of the universe, but they have revolutionized or are revolutionizing,
our practical life, our means of transit, our social conduct, our
treatment of disease.[1]

[Footnote 1: Karl Pearson: _The Grammar of Science_, pp. 35-36.]

Francis Bacon was one of the first to appreciate explicitly
the possibilities of the control of nature in the interests of
human welfare. He saw the vast possibilities which a careful
and comprehensive study of the workings of nature had in the
enlargement of human comfort, security, and power. In _The
New Atlantis_ he envisages an ideal commonwealth, whose
unique and singular institution is a House of Solomon, a kind
of Carnegie Foundation devoted to inquiry, the fruits of
which might be, as they were, exploited in the interests of
human happiness: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge
of causes and the secret motions