Science and the Business of Living

by James G. Vail

Overview

Science, in our time, has gained enormous prestige. This has been earned by a conquest of the material world unique in history. Each new discovery exposes fresh areas for exploration. We live in the constant expectation of new developments capable of providing almost any material thing of which we have need.

How can the great accumulation of knowledge be interpreted so that what is known shall be available when needed? And, more difficult, what is the impact of our work upon the civilization of which we are a part? Although we have learned a great deal about methods of searching for truth it is fairly obvious that some of the new problems exposed by our research have been neglected to our detriment.

Something has gone wrong with our modern world. Unrest and tension between labor and capital, between racial, language, religious, occupational, geographic, political, and economic groups are not the exception, but the general state of affairs around the world. The implications are deep and ominous. It would appear that one contribution that science could make would be to teach the approach to human problems, not in the heat of partisan fervor, not with the prejudgment of ancient dogma, but with the cool analytical attempt to understand causes and find solutions.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940158732713
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	08/08/2017
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #70
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	138 KB

About the Author

James Garrett Vail (1886-1951) was a scientist by trade but his success in that field left him with the time and resources to serve the Religious Society of Friends in his native Philadelphia and around the world. He worked tirelessly with Philadelphia’s representative meeting, which carried out business for the Yearly Meeting while it was out of session. He also worked with the Friends World Committee for Consultation, traveling to Trinidad, South Africa, and Jamaica with that organization. This all followed the beginnings of his work with the American Friends Service Committee, with which he worked in Germany in 1920 and whose executive board he sat upon until his death in 1952. He chaired the Foreign Service Section of that organization for some time.

His success as a scientist was something that he strove to balance with Friends’ testimonies. He rejected the presidency of the American Society of Chemical Engineers during the Second World War because of that organization’s support for the war effort. At the same time, he held such esteem within that organization that the society disrupted their usual pattern of succession and elected him president until after the war. This fit nicely with his own efforts at encouraging his scientific peers to avoid taking a crusading approach to the discipline and instead trying to create a more collegial atmosphere among scientists interested in discovery. This attitude, combined with an awareness of the problems facing a scientist in the twentieth century United States, led him to write the essay, which Pendle Hill published as Science and the Business of Living. This publication occurred during the year after James Vail’s death, in 1952.