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292 Germano Maifreda

the artisan know three times as much as that laborer, and the
merchant more than the artisan; finally, let every living being know
somewhat more than how to eat, drink, sleep, yawn, and annoy his
neighbor, the which marvelous qualities are wonderfully found together
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most often in a life without the misery of need» .
In the pages of Il Caffè, the new enlightened culture is, then, an
open form of co-partnership and dialogue, free of discriminations that
are not those related to the cognitive method chosen for each separate
case. There is no authentic cognitive construct without social relations:
«All the human sciences are but a luxury attached to the condition of
sociable man», Pietro Verri declares unequivocally in The Useful Studies
46
(‘Gli studi utili’) .
Savage societies go on without any sort of science, but this luxury of
reason is what, in fact, distinguishes the crude nations from those civilized;
this luxury is what makes customs more gentle and humane; that which
provides for infinite needs and ennobles, may I say, our species. Whoever,
then, says that a given science is not useful, because the world could go on
without it, accuses that science of an absolute superfluity common to all the
47
others .
Crude men «know that winning a case at law is something useful,
that curing an illness is useful; so they conclude that the science of
the laws, the science of medicine, are useful sciences». But such men
«do not know that intimate and delicate connection which all sciences
have between them; nor do they know that there is but one science in
the world, whose name is the discovery of truth, and that, whatever
the truths may be, they are always useful to mankind and are, in the
universal culture in which Europe finds itself in this century, glorious
at least for the nation in which more [of them] are discovered». The
real difference between ignorance and learning passes, then, through
the overcoming of banal purposing of learning to the useful; it is in
this framework that the praise of the geometric spirit – which represents
one of the most lucid and poetic pages of the entire repertory of the
Lombard Enlightenment – is here so fervently expressed.
I know mathematics – just as they easily disclose even the most unexpected
and sublime truths – are, equally, stingy in producing some that are
immediately useful; but the geometric spirit is a spirit which spreads through
all the sciences and all the arts, perfecting and adorning them in such a way

45 FR1, 135.
46 FR1, 311-8, 313.
47 Ibid., 313.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Agosto 2018 n.43
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)