Il natural desiderio di sapere - Pontifical Academy of Sciences

FEDERICO CESI, THE FIRST ACADEMY, AND UMBRIA 39The preceding conditions are then joined by the one that cinches themodernity of Cesi’s views: ‘Nor is this sufficient, since, in order to dosomething on our own, it is necessary to read well this great, veraciousand universal book of the world’; and in order to do thisit is necessary therefore to visit its parts and exercise oneself inobservation and experimentation so as to ground in these twogood means an acute and profound contemplation, the first representingto us things as they are and how they change by themselves,the other how we ourselves can alter and vary them. 48We do not believe it is an exaggeration of the value of this statement toaffirm that it points to the most profound meaning of modern science, ofGalilean science, which is realized in the close connection between theoretical-conceptualelaboration and verification through experimentation.The greater the awareness of the necessity for scholarship of an ‘exquisiteregularity’ and ‘good order in learning’ the more the impatience withteaching that changes continually ‘from chance and abuses and the differentthoughts or caprices of teachers and customs of places’. 49 Thus Cesi stronglystigmatizes scholarship devoid of method, left completely to the whims ofsubjective invention, where every one can choose one path or another, whereone courses or plummets, rather than moving ‘regularly forward’; where,rather than follow ‘the ordinary path of the preceptor’s authentic writings’,preference is given to disorderly work and research, ‘the hindrances ofshouting, chattering, clowning, the rocky shoals of bad and immoral companions’;he is pained by the rarity of work and research done in common,conducted with the aid of ‘good advice and exhortations, of conferences andthe friendly exchange of thoughts and ideas’, as he denounces the raging ofdisputes in ‘which all is reduced to musicians, impresarios and printers’, to‘altercations’ in which ‘the truth is lost rather than found’, and whichserve to demonstrate nothing except cheek and dicacity and, withall this making a big exhibition and spending thousands of conclusions,one then comes round to the end without having concludedanything. 50Cesi clearly and forcefully contests a culture which exhausts itself in thepassive repetition of schemes from the past, compliant with the ‘authority’of ‘this or that ancient scholar’, of ‘this or that sect’, inclined to enjoyment48 Below, p. 109.49 Below, p. 113.50 Below, p. 113.