John Dewey

Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power.

It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war.

Knowledge divided against itself, a science to whose incompleteness is added an artificial split, has played its part in generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate…

In consequence, man has suffered the impact of an enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs.

Application in life would signify that science was absorbed and distributed; that it was the instrumentality of that common understanding and thorough communication which is the precondition of the existence of a genuine and effective…

When it is then applied, it is in ways which explain the unfavorable sense so often attached to “application” and the “utilitarian”: namely, use for pecuniary ends to the profit of a few.

Science is converted into knowledge in its honorable and emphatic sense only in application.

What is applied and employed as the alternative to knowledge in regulation of society is ignorance, prejudice, class-interest and accident.

The most influential form of the divorce is separation between pure and applied science.

In consequence of this division, they do become in fact enemies, for whatever is consistently kept apart from human values depresses thought and renders values sparse and precarious in fact.

They are taken to be foes of whatever is of ideal value in life, instead of as conditions of its manifestation and sustained being.

For ultimately all consequences which enter human life depend upon physical conditions; they can be understood and mastered only as the latter are taken into account.