I. PRIDE OF SCIENCE II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 67

might have been spent in healthy, happy action, beneficial to all mankind; how many living souls may have been left uncomforted and unhelped by him, while his own eyes were failing by the midnight lamp; how many warm sympathies have died within him as he measured lines or counted letters; how many draughts of ocean air, and steps on mountain turf, and openings of the highest heaven he has lost for his knowledge; how much of that knowledge, so dearly bought, is now forgotten or despised, leaving only the capacity of wonder less within him,¹ and, as it happens in a thousand instances, perhaps even also the capacity of devotion. And let him,-if, after thus dealing with his own heart, he can say that his knowledge has indeed been fruitful to him,-yet consider how many there are who have been forced by the inevitable laws of modern education into toil utterly repugnant to their natures, and that in the extreme, until the whole strength of the young soul was sapped away; and then pronounce with fearfulness how far, and in how many senses, it may indeed be true that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.²

§ 30. Now all this possibility of evil, observe, attaches to knowledge pursued for the noblest ends, if it be pursued imprudently. I have assumed, in speaking of its effect both on men generally and on the artist especially, that it was sought in the true love of it, and with all honesty and directness of purpose. But this is granting far too much in its favour. Of knowledge in general, and without qualification, it is said by the Apostle that “it puffeth up;”³ and the father of all modern science, writing directly in its praise, yet asserts this danger even in more absolute terms, calling it a “venomousness” in the very nature of knowledge itself.⁴

¹ [In his copy for revision Ruskin here writes at the side-from Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastic Sonnets (pt. iii. 33):-

“I dread the boasted lights

That all too often are but fiery blights.”]

² [1 Corinthians iii. 19.]

³[1 Corinthians viii. 1.]

⁴ [Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Book i., i. 3: “Knowledge ... hath in it some nature of venom or malignity.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]