Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 1901
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1901natur..63..298s&link_type=abstract
Nature, Volume 63, Issue 1630, pp. 298-299 (1901).
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
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'' θɛωρíα 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.
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