The desire for knowledge

The desire for knowledge, and on the judgments of false scholars

The human mind undoubtedly has very little capacity and extent, and yet there is nothing it does not wish to know; all human sciences cannot satisfy its desires, and its capacity is so narrow that it cannot perfectly understand a single particular science. It is continually agitated, and it always desires to know, either because it hopes to find what it seeks, as we have said in the preceding chapters, or because it persuades itself that its soul and its mind are enlarged by the vain possession of some extraordinary knowledge. The disordered desire for its happiness and its greatness makes it study all the sciences, hoping to find its happiness in the moral sciences, and seeking this false greatness in the speculative sciences.

Why is it that there are persons who spend their whole lives reading rabbis and other books written in foreign, obscure, and corrupted languages, and by authors without taste and without intelligence; if not because they persuade themselves that when they know the Oriental languages, they are greater and more elevated than those who are ignorant of them? And who can sustain them in their ungrateful, disagreeable, painful, and useless labor, if not the hope of some elevation and the view of some vain greatness?

In effect, they are regarded as rare men; compliments are paid to them on their profound erudition; they are listened to more willingly than others: and although one can say that they are ordinarily the least judicious, if only because they have employed their whole life in a very useless thing, which can render them neither wiser nor happier; nevertheless one imagines that they have much more wit and judgment than the others. Being more learned in the origin of words, one allows oneself to be persuaded that they are learned in the nature of things.

It is for the same reason that astronomers employ their time and their fortune to know exactly what is not only useless, but impossible to know. They wish to find in the course of the planets an exact regularity which is never found there, and to draw up astronomical tables to predict effects whose causes they do not know. They have made the selenography or geography of the moon, as if one had some design of traveling there. They have already divided it among all those who are illustrious in astronomy; there are few who do not have some province in that country, as a reward for their great labors; and I do not know if they do not make some glory of having been in the good graces of the one who has so magnificently distributed these kingdoms to them.

Why is it that reasonable men apply themselves so strongly to this science and remain in very gross errors with regard to the truths that it is very useful for them to know, if not because it seems to them that it is something great to know what passes in the heavens?

The knowledge of the least thing that passes up there seems to them more noble, more elevated, and more worthy of the greatness of their mind than the knowledge of vile, abject, and corruptible things, as are according to their sentiment the only sublunary bodies. The nobility of a science is drawn from the nobility of its object: that is a great principle! The knowledge of the movement of inalterable and incorruptible bodies is therefore the highest and most elevated of all sciences. Thus it appears to them worthy of the greatness and excellence of their mind.

Thus men allow themselves to be dazzled by a false idea of greatness which flatters them and agitates them. As soon as their imagination is struck by it, it prostrates itself before this phantom; it reveres it and overturns and blinds the reason which ought to judge it. It seems that men dream when they judge the objects of their passions and that they lack common sense. For finally what is there great in the knowledge of the movements of the planets, and do we not know enough presently to regulate our months and our years? What business have we so much to know whether Saturn is surrounded by a ring or by a great number of little moons, and why take sides on that? Why glorify oneself for having predicted the magnitude of an eclipse where one has perhaps been more successful than another, because one has been more fortunate?

There are persons destined by the order of the prince to observe the stars; let us be content with their observations. They apply themselves to this employment with reason, for they apply themselves to it by duty: it is their business. They work at it with success, for they work at it without ceasing with art, with application, and with all the exactness possible; nothing is lacking for them to succeed. Thus we should be fully satisfied on a matter that touches us so little, when they share their discoveries with us.

It is good that several persons apply themselves to anatomy, since it is extremely useful to know it, and the knowledge to which we ought to aspire is that which is most useful to us. We can and ought to apply ourselves to what contributes something to our happiness, or rather to the relief of our infirmities and miseries. But to spend all night hanging on a telescope to discover in the heavens some spot or some new planet, to lose one’s health and fortune and abandon the care of one’s affairs to regularly visit the stars and to measure their magnitudes and situations, it seems to me that this is entirely forgetting both what one is presently and what one will be one day.

And let no one say that it is to recognize the greatness of Him who made all these great objects. The least gnat manifests more the power and wisdom of God to those who consider it with attention, and without being preoccupied with its smallness, than all that astronomers know of the heavens. Nevertheless men are not made to examine all their lives gnats and insects; and one does not too much approve the pains that some persons have given themselves to teach us how the lice of each species of animal are made, and the transformations of different worms into flies and butterflies. It is permissible to amuse oneself with that when one has nothing to do and to divert oneself; but men must not employ all their time in it unless they are insensible to their miseries.

They must incessantly apply themselves to the knowledge of God and of themselves, work seriously to rid themselves of their errors and prejudices, of their passions and inclinations to sin; seek with ardor the truths that are most necessary for them. For finally those are the most judicious who seek with the most care the most solid truths.

The principal cause that engages men in false studies is that they have attached the idea of “learned” to vain and unfruitful knowledge, instead of attaching it only to solid and necessary sciences. For when a man sets his mind on becoming learned, and the spirit of polymathy begins to agitate him, he hardly examines what are the sciences most necessary for him, either to conduct himself as an honest man, or to perfect his reason; he only regards those who pass for learned in the world and what there is in them that makes them considerable. All the most solid and most necessary sciences being common enough, they do not make those who possess them admired or respected; for one regards without attention and without emotion common things, however beautiful and admirable they may be in themselves. Those who wish to become learned therefore hardly stop at the sciences necessary for the conduct of life and for the perfection of the mind. These sciences do not awaken in them that idea of the sciences they have formed, for they are not these sciences that they have admired in others and that they wish to be admired in them.

The Gospel and morality are too common and too ordinary sciences; they wish to know the criticism of some terms that are found in the ancient philosophers or in the Greek poets. Languages, and principally those that are not in use in their country, such as Arabic and Rabbinic or some other similar ones, appear to them worthy of their application and study. If they read Holy Scripture, it is not to learn religion and piety from it; the points of chronology, of geography, and grammatical difficulties occupy them entirely; they desire with more ardor the knowledge of these things than the salutary truths of the Gospel. They wish to possess in themselves the science they have foolishly admired in others, and which fools will not fail to admire in them.

Likewise in the knowledge of nature they hardly seek the most useful, but the least common. Anatomy is too low for them, but astronomy is more elevated. Ordinary experiments are little worthy of their application; but those rare and surprising experiments, which can never enlighten our minds, are those they observe with the most care.

The rarest and most ancient histories are those they make a glory of knowing. They do not know the genealogy of the princes who presently reign, and they carefully seek that of men who died four thousand years ago. They neglect to learn the most common histories of their time, and they try to know exactly the fables and fictions of the poets. They do not even know their own parents; but if you wish, they will bring you several authorities to prove to you that a Roman citizen was allied to an emperor, and other similar things.

They scarcely know the name of the ordinary garments used in their time, and they amuse themselves seeking those used by the Greeks and Romans. The animals of their country are little known to them, and they will not fear to employ several years to compose great volumes on the animals of the Bible, to appear to have guessed better than others what unknown terms signify. Such a book is the delight of its author and of the scholars who read it, because being all sewn together with Greek, Hebrew, Arabic passages, etc., with citations of rabbis and other obscure and extraordinary authors, it satisfies the vanity of its author and the foolish curiosity of those who read it, who will believe themselves also more learned than others when they can proudly affirm that there are six different words in Scripture to signify a lion or something similar.

The map of their country or even of their city is often unknown to them while they study the maps of ancient Greece, of Italy, of the Gauls in the time of Julius Caesar, or the streets and public places of ancient Rome. Labor stultorum, says the Wise Man, affliget eos qui nesciunt in urbem pergere: they do not know the way to their city, and they foolishly fatigue themselves in useless researches. They do not know the laws nor the customs of the places where they live; but they carefully study ancient law, the laws of the Twelve Tables, the customs of the Lacedaemonians or of the Chinese, or the ordinances of the Great Mogul. Finally they wish to know all things rare, extraordinary, distant, and that others do not know, because they have attached by a reversal of mind the idea of “learned” to these things, and it suffices to be esteemed learned to know what others do not know, even if one ignores the most necessary and most beautiful truths. It is true that the knowledge of all these things and other similar ones is called science, erudition, doctrine; usage has so willed it; but there is a science that is only folly and foolishness, according to Scripture: Doctrina stultorum fatuitas. I have not yet noticed that the Holy Spirit, who gives so many praises to science in the holy books, says anything to the advantage of this false science of which I have just spoken.