Knowledge more than a means. – Even without this new passion – I mean the passion for knowledge – science would be promoted: up to now science has grown and matured without it. The good faith in science, the prejudice in its favour that rules our modern states (and formerly even the Church), is essentially based on the fact that this unconditional tendency and urge has manifested itself in science so rarely and that science is specifically regarded not as a passion but as a condition and ‘ethos’. Indeed, often mere amour-plaisir6 of knowledge (curiosity) is sufficient, or amour-vanité,7 being accustomed to it with the ulterior motive of honour and bread; it is even enough for many that they have a surplus of leisure and do not know what to do with it except read, collect, arrange, observe, recount – their ‘scientific drive’ is their boredom. Pope Leo X8 once (in his brief to Beroaldus)9 sang the praise of science: he designated it the most beautiful ornament and the greatest pride of our life, a noble occupation in happiness and unhappiness; ‘without it’, he says finally, ‘all human undertakings would lack a firm hold – indeed, even with it they are changeable and unstable enough!’ But this fairly sceptical pope keeps silent, like all other churchly eulogists of science, his final judgement on science. Although one might infer from his words that he places science above art – strange as this may be for such a friend of the arts – in the end it is nothing but politeness when he does not speak of what he, too, places high above all science: ‘revealed truth’ and the ‘eternal salvation of the soul’. Compared to that, what are ornaments, pride, entertainment, and the security of life to him! ‘Science is something second-class; nothing ultimate, unconditional; not an object of passion’ – this judgement was held back in Leo’s soul: the truly Christian judgement about science! In antiquity the dignity and recognition of science were diminished by the fact that even among her most zealous disciples the striving for virtue took first place, and that one thought one had given knowledge one’s highest praise when one celebrated it as the best means to virtue. It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a means.