The science of social adjustment / by Sir Josiah Stamp.

  • Josiah Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp
Date:
1937
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The science of social adjustment / by Sir Josiah Stamp. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    obsorve the natural consequences of an iin])rovenient in female infant mortality two decades earlierd I do not then pretend to dogmatize as to how far the scientist should become a social reformer. One physicist welcomes the growing sense of social re- s]')onsibility, among some scientists at least, for the world the labours of their order have so largely created, though he deplores that in this field they are still utterly unscientific. Then another great authority. Sir Henry Dale, declares that it is the scientists’ job to develop their science without dictating the policy for uses to which their work may be put.^ Sir William Tilden and many others have urged that pure science makes its best advances when it bothers least about applied science, but that must not be confused with both pure and applied science not bothering about social applications and effects.^ I have long watched the processes by which the scientific specialist ‘ makes up his mind ’ in fields of enquiry outside his own. It seems still a matter for investigation whether the development of a specialist’s thinking, on balance, impairs or improves the powers of general thinking compared with what they might otherwise have been. We do not know the kind or degree of truth that may rest in Anatole France’s aphorism : “ The worst of science is, it stops you thinking ”. Perhaps this was more subtly expressed in the simpler words of the darky mother : “If you haven’t an education, you’ve jest got to use yoh brains My own experience is that when the attempt to 1 Vide G. Pitt-Rivers, “ The Probleni of Maternal Mortality ”, Eugenics Revieic, l!)34-35, j). 273. “ Biologij and Civilization. ^ Vide especially Sir R. A. Gregory: Disrorenj, pp. 235 et scg.
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