What but this is the
meaning of vaccination and all the serums, and immunity from infection
through lapse of time?
If this notion of absolute health were not an abstract category,
something which does not strictly exist, we might say that a perfectly
healthy man would be no longer a man, but an irrational animal.
Irrational, because of the lack of some disease to set a spark to his
reason. And this disease which gives us the appetite of knowing for the
sole pleasure of knowing, for the delight of tasting of the fruit of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is a real disease and a tragic
one.
_Pantes anthropoi ton eidenai oregontai phusei_, "all men
naturally desire to know." Thus Aristotle begins his Metaphysic, and it
has been repeated a thousand times since then that curiosity or the
desire to know, which according to Genesis led our first mother to sin,
is the origin of knowledge.
But it is necessary to distinguish here between the desire or appetite
for knowing, apparently and at first sight for the love of knowledge
itself, between the eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, and the necessity of knowing for the sake of living. The
latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and which in a
certain sense might be called, if it does not seem too paradoxical,
unconscious knowledge, is common both to men and animals, while that
which distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowing
that we know.
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