Il natural desiderio di sapere - Pontifical Academy of Sciences

ON THE NATURAL DESIRE FOR KNOWLEDGE 119invention and composition; 51 these amenities are rarely sought, however,and studies are attended to with weak means and little order and withfewer aids. Hence it is no wonder if of the few who study only a tiny fewarrive at a noble degree of knowledge.And I believe that primarily everything proceeds from the end forwhich one studies which, for the most part, is not knowledge at all, butgain, honors, favors and comforts, which, as they cannot be obtained withthe advance of studies to the true attainment of the sciences, men pursueas best they can with the warping of the sciences, addressing their studiesin such a manner that they manage to achieve some part of them; so thatat the same time they abuse reason and study as well as sciential terms. 52And this is why the majority of scholars follow those professions which aremore suitable to this, that is law and medicine, the latter for the public andprivate practice and the collection of the daily stipend 53 house by house,the former for governments and offices and ministries at the service ofprinces and retainers and procurations, to harvest no lesser fruits.The most abandoned and derelict are the same ones 54 that are best ableto satisfy the native desire, those that give us the most cognition and bringus more perfection and ornament, I say the great philosophy, mathematicsand the philological and poetical eruditions; there are few who, even justhearing them named, do not refuse them and immediately condemn them,saying that they are not breadwinning activities, thus revealing what theirobjectives are, a truly ancient defect, about which we have in Ovid:Saepe pater dixit: studium quid inutile tentas?Maeonides nullas ipse reliquit opes. 55Those then who content themselves with doing the least philosophicalstudies or courses for the most part truly course to arrive either at medi-51 This is a synthetic description of the principal intention behind the encyclopedicor pansophical form in Renaissance and Baroque culture: synopsis aims precisely,according to its own etymology, at producing an effect of comprehension and hierarchicalgrasp with respect to the articulations of the real world.52 They abuse the terms proper to science.53 In addition to their regular practice, that is, account must be taken of incomesfrom single medical interventions or house calls.54 Sciences.55 ‘Often my father said to me: why do you give yourself to useless study? Homerhimself left no riches’, Trist., IV, X, vv. 21-22.