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Reading Il Caffè: scientific method and economic knowledge in the “School of Milan” 299

its way of conceiving science. «Let science fall silent for a moment and
opinion hold sway – farewell humankind – you fall back into your delir-
iums and good-bye until you reawaken. […] Your fears, the taste for
the marvelous, the dreams (now weighty, now sad) of your imagination,
the deception of the senses in things physical are inexhaustible sources
71
of many strange things that now and again circle round our globe» .
The conquests in the art of measurement are not necessarily harbingers
of good: «Man then measures distance, weight, the velocity of the
planets; he knows then the miracles of mathematics; he has built
ships, clocks, carriages, fountains, telescopes, has, in brief, perfected
the arts and the sciences in the highest degree; and yet he has no
clear, simple and exact ideas of morality».
The ancients based their moral systems on a great and admirable
investigation: everything was enthusiasm, the virtues were gigantic.
They rarely reasoned; almost always they were poets. In recent times,
conversely, it seems all morality is to be reduced to exact analysis.
Perhaps neither the one nor the other of these methods is the true one.
That of the ancients brought forth proud Stoics, sublime men – very
nearly, I should say, monsters – of virtue; but that is simply the effect
of a robust enthusiasm which can never be a common trait of mankind;
and morality must be common. Yet the chill analysis of some of our
modern men carries with it the inconvenience of making them become
used to being too straightly on guard towards their own sentiments
and to calculate the actions of life with the same detachment [«esatta
72
discussione»] with which they work through a mathematical problem .
Reasoning upon good and evil, truth and falsehood, brings him
again to mathematics and formalization: but with results it is difficult
to connect back to the full and confident participation one seems to
find in other pages written during this complex and multifaceted
period of our modern history.

Conclusions

From a first reconsideration of the literature and some of the
available sources, we can see that the analyses and the projects of the
Enlightened Lombards were amply suffused with acceptance and ad-
miration for the scientific method, consolidated in a continuing circu-
lation of individuals and written material among the various European
areas between the Sixteen and Seventeen hundreds. A reading of

71 FR2, 636-7.
72 See in FR2, 686-94, the article by Pietro Verri Alcune idee sulla filosofia morale.

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