Wisdom Into Knowledge

Extract

Our Western civilization can legitimately reflect that it has bestowed on the rest of mankind one or two valuable treasures in the domain of the things of the spirit. One such treasure is the unspoiled instinct for speculative truth. Greek philosophy, and Aristotle, first enabled us to realize the absolute value of wholehearted detachment from affective inclinations, and of chaste, severe, pure science, whose only function and purpose is the discernment of that which is—vision. Later the West was to know that the Word of God came into the world to the end that He might bear witness to the truth, to know too that eternal life is eternal vision; further, it came to be moulded by scholastic discipline and the stern claims of intellect: hence it is quite natural that it should have so long retained, in its concept of knowledge, an appreciation of the dignity of speculative truth.

Now the modern world is fast losing such an appreciation in every domain of knowledge save in the one wherein it really excelled—I mean in the science of phenomena. At the age of the Renascence a very general propensity of heart towards earthly goods conditioned the widespread success of the new scientific methods, and, with it, the preference given to Science rather than Wisdom. Note too that science, though capable of provoking many a cupidity in man, itself remained immune from the tarnish of appetitive elements. Science has been for the modern world the last stronghold of the sacredness of truth and of spiritual values—inefficacious spiritual values, because the spirituality concerned is not wisdom spirituality and because in the practical order it can be turned to evil as well as to good uses; and that is why present-day rationalism knows so much of melancholia.