Il natural desiderio di sapere - Pontifical Academy of Sciences

FEDERICO CESI, THE FIRST ACADEMY, AND UMBRIA 51or that maestro’, without ‘preferring one author’, ‘one sect more than another’,always proceeding ‘ahead with our own intellects, by philosophizingwith all sincerity, without any passion that could alter it in the search fortruth’, but above all by devoting oneself to a contemporaneous work of theoreticalreflection and experimental research.Cesi’s speech then turns, with new and modern accents, to the outlineof a model of scientific research based on the availability of means andcollegial collaboration among scholars. A suitable place for research, infact, will be a place equipped with ‘complete libraries’, with ‘sure andprompt publications’, with amenities for ‘orderly experimentation andperegrination’. All of this, however, is not enough because the scholar alsorelies on ‘the continuous guidance and help of elders and colleges’, on ‘thehelp of companions’, who will, on the one hand, communicate the resultsof their own research, but above allwith continuous, friendly, and loyal conference they will correct,refine, and enrich our ideas and awaken new ones, always helpingwith both counsel and advice, not least by always signifying to uswhat may occur in any place in literary matters or new observationsor instruments or compositions or other things as thoughthey were universally present. 69For Cesi, true scholarship is distinguished, besides the availability ofmeans, by the moral and spiritual qualities of the scholars themselves: the‘hard and laborious exercise’ of scholarship, the constant labor which itrequires, will have its sweetest ‘fruits’ not in the acquisition of ‘honors andoffices’ of ‘appointments and positions’, but in the memory of this communalwork in which a healthy envy puts the researchers in a situation of emulation,which gives rise to ‘sparks of hope for glory in everyone’. 70At this point Cesi’s speech abandons the details of his methodologicalindications and turns more intimate and emotional in the exaltation offriendship, of the fraternal union in which the ‘emulation’ in these ‘congregations’,‘comparisons’, assemblies’ is not in fact harmful but stimulatesa ‘competition’ that is not jealous of the success of others. Any projectof community scholarship will have to ban ‘all controversy outside ofthe natural and mathematical’, will always remain subject to the ‘bond offriendship and correspondence of good will’. 71 We are now at the culmi-69 Below, p. 131.70 Below, p. 133.71 Below, pp. 139, 145.