He never took
the bit of art[102] between his teeth where only poetry, and not
doctrine, was concerned.
If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was practical a guide for the
conduct of life, it was, on the other, a much more transcendent thing,
whose body was wisdom her soul love, and her efficient cause truth. It is
a practice of wisdom from the mere love of it, for so we must interpret
his _amoroso uso di sapienzia_, when we remember how he has said
before[103] that "the love of wisdom for its delight or profit is not
true love of wisdom." And this love must embrace knowledge in all its
branches, for Dante is content with nothing less than a pancratic
training, and has a scorn of _dilettanti_, specialists, and quacks.
"Wherefore none ought to be called a true philosopher who for any delight
loves any part of knowledge, as there are many who delight in composing
_Canzoni_, and delight to be studious in them, and who delight to be
studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and abandon the other
sciences which are all members of wisdom."[104] "Many love better to be
held masters than to be so." With him wisdom is the generalization from
many several knowledges of small account by themselves; it results
therefore from breadth of culture, and would be impossible without it.
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