ey
became historically cut off, as they may in the case of the pure
scientist still be cut off, from practical considerations. But no
matter how remote and abstract they become, they yield
again practical fruits.

Applied science, if it becomes too narrowly interested in
practical results, limits its own resources. Purely theoretical
inquiry may be of the most immense ultimate advantage. In
a sense the more abstract and remote science becomes, the
more eventual promise it contains. By getting away from the
confusing and irrelevant details of particular situations,
science is enabled to frame generalizations applicable to a wide
array of phenomena differing in detail, but having in common
significant characteristics. Men can learn fruitfully to control
their experience precisely because they can emancipate
themselves from the immediate demands of practical life,
from the suggestions that arise in the course of instinctive and
habitual action. "A certain power of _abstraction_, of
deliberate turning away from the habitual responses to a situation,
was required before men could be emancipated to follow up
suggestions that in the end are fruitful."[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 156.]

Too complete absorption in immediate problems may operate
to deprive action of that sweeping and penetrating vision
which a freer inquiry affords. The temporarily important
may be the less important in the long run. A practical
adjustment of detail may produce immediate benefits in the way of
improved industrial processes and more rapid and economical
production, but some seemingly obscure discovery in the most
abstruse reaches of scientific theory may eventually be of
untold practical significance.

Only the extremely ignorant can question the utility of, let us say,
the prolonged application of the Greek intellect to the laws of conic
sections. Whether we think of bridges or projectiles, of the curves
of ships, or of the rules of navigation, we must think of conic sections.
The rules of navigation, for instance, are in part based on astronomy.
Kepler's Laws are foundation stones of that science, but Kepler discovered
that Mars moves in an ellipse round the sun in one of the
foci by a deduction from conic sections.... Yet the historical fact
is that these conic sections were studied as an abstract science for
eighteen centuries before they came to be of their highest use.[2]

[Footnote 2: Thomson: _Introduction to Scienc