“Truth and utility,” wrote Francis Bacon, the early seventeenth-century English philosopher and statesman, “are the very same things.” In other words, the truth of beliefs about the world is guaranteed only by the capacity of those beliefs to be turned into actions that produce the practical outcomes that human beings desire.
实际上，科学的两个侧面关系更加紧密——与其说是它们是不同的侧面还不如说是彻底混合在一起的两种成份更妥当。十七世纪早期英国哲人兼政治家弗兰西斯·培根写道，“求真和致用其实是一回事。”换句话讲，只有有能力将信仰转化为人类所期望的实际结果才能保障与世界相关的信仰的真实。