Abstract
SIR JAMES BARRETT reiterates in his letter the views he has expressed in his book “The Twin Ideals”, which I reviewed in NATURE, but I fail to see how they have been or can be misunderstood. He says that at times practical discoveries of value are made incidentally to researches pursued for their own sake, apart from practical ends, and that such investigators assume their efforts to be the only kind of research worth considering. It would be more generally agreed, I think, that all the great practical advances of the present scientific era owe their origin to purely theoretical investigations pursued for their own sake, and that such work is as different from the pursuit of practical discoveries of value as scientific exploration is from prospecting for gold, minerals, or specific commodities. To ask whether researches conducted with a definite practical end are not equal, if not superior, to those concerned with the advancement of the boundaries of knowledge seems like asking whether the fruit of a tree is not of equal or superior value to its root. To suggest that those pursuing researches of a recondite and academic character, who find it necessary for their work to withdraw largely from the practical world of affairs and politics, are only outside reasonable criticism if their work is pursued at their own expense seems as unreasonable as to deny nourishment to the roots of a tree because of their recluseness, their indifference to the immediate requirements of the world and inability to survive being hauled out into it.
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SODDY, F. Research and Service. Nature 103, 404 (1919). https://doi.org/10.1038/103404b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/103404b0
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