The Ethics of Higher Studies

THE ETHICS OF HIGHER STUDIES Etienne Gilson

What is a scholar? •

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Just as a scholar is not a man who knows everything in general, so he is not a man who knows everything even in his own line. He is a man who knows practically all that can at the present time be known in his line, who naturalizes his own ignorance and is working very hard to reduce it.

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Scholarship, therefore, does not consist primarily in the quantity of knowledge a man possesses, but in the way he possesses it. A true scholar is essentially a man whose intellectual life is part and parcel of his moral life. A scholar is a man who has decided, once and for all, to carry all the requirements of his moral consciousness into his intellectual life.

Intellectual honesty •

A scrupulous respect for the truth

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Before absorbing knowledge, one has to produce it.

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The true scholar who gives you a bibliography will certainly give you the titles of all the books he has read concerning the question, and only those titles. He is not the man who is about to quote a book he has never used, or to use a book he never quotes.  He would not do it, because he things his reader has a right to know whence he derived his information and where one has to look for more.

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The true scholar never says that a man wrote such and such a sentence without saying at the same time where he wrote it, not because it looks well to make quotations and to give references, but because we have a right to verify his quotation and to see whether, in its original context, the sentence has that very meaning which it seems to have when cut loose from it.

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If you are a true scholar and write own that quotation for me, you will not write it from memory at the risk of changing a word or two in it, because through changing its words you might change its meaning, impose on a man what he never said, and impose on me the false conviction that this man said what really had not. There are no negligible details for intellectual honesty any more than for moral honesty.

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Quantity can be considered as negligible. Quantity follows quality. Humility = objectivity Truth will make you free; submission to it will make you great.