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298 Germano Maifreda

Working with one’s hands makes the imagination agile and leads to respect
for reason, our sovereign, without becoming her servile courtiers – for
otherwise she sets leaden seals upon the imagination and obliges you to dig
in, where you need to flow. It is not a question of analyzing, but one of
composing. Be stingy with pleasing errors and, for heaven’s sake do not allow
one of Plato’s handsome chimeras to slip through your hands for a sober ar-
gument by Locke. Gaining a little philosophic indolence in things human is
very appropriate for your purpose, in business as in the search for truth, of
which you shall neither be an unfaithful nor a rebellious subject, but simply
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an obscure and idle farmer .
For an author in whom we should perhaps be hard put to recognize
the same voice as that of The Attempt at the Analysis of Contrabands,
a «handsome chimera» of Plato’s is preferable to the «sober argument»
of the beloved Locke, who would not perhaps have approved of this
praise of “philosophic indolence” and the sweet invitation to allow
things to «slip through […] your hands» instead of «dig[ging] in». In
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Some Thoughts on the Origins of Errors , Pietro Verri, in turn, reminds
us that many of our errors have a common origin:
Our errors also originate in the narrow limits of our sensibility, which –
whether sometimes shaken, or lacking in vigor – barely reacts to the objects
which strike the senses, or indeed, heavily battered and absorbed in a single
conquering phantom, sees other things only vaguely and with blurred shapes;
in the first case, it finds itself on intermediate steps to sleep, in the latter, on
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the road that leads to delirium .
«Flowing» rather than «digging» may be a good antidote, for those
who are engaged in science, to the illusions generated by the senses. In
Some ideas on Moral Philosophy , Alessandro Verri leaves few illusions
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on this head: «Men hear more or less wholesale what is useful to them,
and the actions of their life are directed by a mechanism of sensations
rather than a reasoned analysis». «Man is always imbecile», as he put it
in the longer Little Commentary of a Bad Tempered Gentleman Who is
Right, on the Definition: Man is a Reasonable Animal, in Which We Shall
See What It Is All About. «[He] makes an effort to scale the cliff of truth,
stumbling he reaches it and, from time to time, even up there he plays
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the child» . The hard work of truth, and the uncertain hold reason
offers, open the way to cognitive results that are far from the trusting
optimism sometimes still today attributed to enlightened culture and

66 Ibid., 478.
67 FR2, 537-9.
68 FR2, 538.
69 FR2, 685-95.
70 FR2, 624-53.

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