The second rule of curiosity

The second rule of curiosity

The second rule that must be observed is that novelty must never serve us as a reason to believe that things are true. We have already said several times that men must not rest in error and in the false goods they enjoy; that it is just that they seek the evidence of truth and the true good they do not possess, and consequently that they turn toward things that are new and extraordinary to them; but they must not for that always attach themselves to them nor believe, by lightness of mind, that new opinions are true because they are new, and that goods are true because they have not yet enjoyed them. Novelty should only push them to examine new things with care; they must not despise them, since they do not know them, nor believe so rashly that they contain what they wish and what they hope.

But here is what happens often enough. Men, after having examined ancient and common opinions, have not recognized in them the light of truth. After having tasted ordinary goods, they have not found in them the solid pleasure that must accompany the possession of good; their desires and their eagerness have therefore not been appeased by ordinary opinions and goods. If therefore one speaks to them of something new and extraordinary, the idea of novelty makes them first hope that this is precisely what they seek; and because one ordinarily flatters oneself and willingly believes that things are as one wishes them to be, their hopes strengthen in proportion as their desires increase, and finally they insensibly change into imaginary assurances. They then attach so strongly the idea of novelty to the idea of truth, that one is never represented without the other; and what is newer always appears to them more true and better than what is more ordinary and more common; very different in this from some who, having joined the idea of novelty with that of falsity by aversion for heresies, imagine that all new opinions are false and that they contain something dangerous.

One can therefore say that this ordinary disposition of the mind and heart of men with regard to everything that bears the character of novelty, is one of the most general causes of their errors, for it almost never leads them to truth. When it leads them there, it is only by chance and by luck; and finally it always turns them away from their true good by stopping them in that multiplicity of diversions and false goods with which the world is filled; which is the most dangerous error into which one can fall.

The Third Rule of Curiosity

The third rule against excessive desires for novelty is that, when we are assured from elsewhere that truths are so hidden that it is morally impossible to discover them, and that goods are so small and slight that they cannot make us happy, we must not allow ourselves to be excited by the novelty that is found there.

Everyone can know by faith, by reason, and by experience, that all created goods cannot fill the infinite capacity of the will. Faith teaches us that all the things of the world are only vanity, and that our happiness does not consist in honors nor in riches. Reason assures us that, since it is not in our power to limit our desires and we are carried by a natural inclination to love all goods, we cannot become happy except by possessing the one that contains them all. Our own experience makes us feel that we are not happy in the possession of the goods we enjoy, since we still wish for others. Finally, we see every day that the great goods that princes and even the most powerful kings enjoy on earth are not yet capable of satisfying their desires; that they even have more anxieties and displeasures than others; and that being, so to speak, at the top of the wheel of fortune, they must be infinitely more agitated and shaken by its movement than those who are below and closer to the center. For finally they never fall except from the top; they never receive except great wounds; and all that greatness that accompanies them and that they attach to their own being only makes them larger and more extended, so that they are capable of a greater number of wounds and more exposed to the blows of fortune.

Faith, reason, and experience, therefore, convincing us that the goods and pleasures of the earth, of which we have not yet tasted, would not make us happy if we possessed them, we must take good heed, according to this third rule, not to let ourselves be foolishly flattered by a mad hope of happiness, which increasing little by little in proportion to our passion and our desires, would finally change into a false assurance. For when one is extremely passionate for some good, one always imagines it very great and one even insensibly persuades oneself that one will be happy when one possesses it.

We must therefore resist these vain desires, since it would be useless to try to satisfy them; but principally also because when one lets oneself go to one’s passions and one employs one’s time to satisfy them, one loses God and all things with Him. One only runs from one false good after another false good; one always lives in false hopes; one dissipates oneself, one agitates oneself in a thousand different ways; one finds oppositions everywhere because the goods one seeks are desired by many and cannot be possessed by many, and finally one dies and one possesses nothing more. For, as Saint Paul teaches us [5], those who wish to become rich fall into temptation and into the snare of the devil, and into various useless and pernicious desires that precipitate men into the abyss of perdition and damnation; for cupidity is the root of all evils.

But if we must not turn to the search for goods of the earth that are new to us, because we are assured that we will not find there the happiness we seek, we must not either have the least desire to know new opinions on a very great number of difficult questions, because we know from elsewhere that the human mind could not discover their truth. Most of the questions treated in morality and principally in physics are of this nature, and we must, for this reason, be very distrustful of the books that are composed every day on these very obscure and very entangled matters. For although, absolutely speaking, the questions they contain can be resolved, nevertheless there are still so few truths discovered and there are so many others to know before coming to those treated in these books, that one can not read them without risking losing much.

However, this is not how men conduct themselves; they do the very opposite. They do not examine whether what they are told is possible. One only has to promise them extraordinary things, such as the repair of natural heat, of radical moisture, of vital spirits, or other things they do not understand, to excite their vain curiosity and to preoccupy them. It suffices to dazzle them and to win them over to propose paradoxes to them; to use obscure words, terms of influences, the authority of some unknown authors, or else to make some very sensible and very extraordinary experiment, although it has no relation to what one advances, for it suffices to stun them to convince them.

If a physician, a surgeon, an empiricist cites Greek and Latin passages and uses new and extraordinary terms for those who listen to him, they are great men. One gives them the right of life and death; one believes them as oracles; they themselves imagine that they are well above the common run of men and that they penetrate the depths of things; and if one is indiscreet enough to show that one does not take for reason five or six words that mean and prove nothing, they imagine that one has no common sense and that one denies the first principles. Indeed, the first principles of these people are five or six Latin words of an author, or else some Greek passage if they are more skillful.

It is even necessary that learned physicians sometimes speak a language their patients do not understand, to acquire some reputation and to make themselves obeyed.

A physician who knows only Latin may well be esteemed in the village, because Latin is Greek and Arabic for peasants. But if a physician does not know at least how to read Greek, to learn some aphorism of Hippocrates, he must not expect to pass for a learned man in the minds of city people who ordinarily know Latin. Thus physicians, even the most learned, knowing this fancy of men, find themselves obliged to speak like the charlatans and the ignorant, and one must not always judge their capacity and their good sense by the things they may say in their visits. If they speak Greek sometimes, it is to charm the patient and not the illness, for they know well that a Greek passage has never cured anyone.