Education Quote by Albert J. Nock

Nock doesn’t romanticize the “scientific school” as a temple of pure inquiry; he frames it as an engine room. “Business” is doing deliberate work, with deliverables, and the deliverable he names is “useful knowledge” - not truth in the abstract, not culture, not moral uplift. That choice is pointed. Nock is praising a specific kind of institutional humility: science earns its social license by producing know-how that circulates beyond the lab and classroom into agriculture, medicine, engineering, administration - the infrastructure of daily survival.

The sentence then pulls a neat rhetorical double move. It calls dissemination “noble,” but immediately yokes nobility to necessity: “indispensable withal.” Subtext: if you want to defend scientific institutions in public life, don’t sell them as ornament or as elite self-expression. Sell them as continuity. The line “society can not exist unless it goes on” sounds almost tautological, which is the point; Nock is grounding his argument in a blunt condition of civilization. A society isn’t a static inheritance, it’s a process that must be continually reproduced, and knowledge is one of the few assets that can compound rather than deplete.

Context matters too. Writing in an era of rapid industrialization, world war, and expanding bureaucratic states, Nock understood how fragile “progress” is - and how quickly it can be commandeered. By emphasizing dissemination, he’s quietly warning against hoarding expertise, credential gatekeeping, and research severed from public use. Science, for him, is not just discovery; it’s transmission, or it fails its civic job.