Knowledge, science, research are ways of renewing our bond with the world. They are rooted in spiritual longing. For this longing, knowledge is actually only a palliative. Knowledge exists to justify, not glut, the hunger. Should the university slake the thirst for truth and reality, the mind would then sink back into self-indulgence. Knowledge proceeds "with the observant eye of duty and admiration, "Francis Bacon once said. Admiration is the seed of knowledge. In time a seed becomes a root. And a root sustains a plant all through its life. In other words, the kernel of wonder that awakens knowledge needs to feedknowledge through its growth. Knowledge without the sustaining influx of wonder simply decays. Have we given up on wonder? Surely science does cause us to look at the world with eyes wide open. But do we really work in a spirit of wonder and appreciation? We are members of institutions, paid professionals who are busycompeting on the market of fashionable dogmas. Too often, we deal with reality as a mine of cashable information. We look at reality with a view to cutting and slicing it for human consumption. By habit we make the objective world consumable by the subjective. This is how knowledge loses touch with the metaphysical love that gave it life. It turns terras incognitas into track developments. Have we grown afraid of reality? What guides our research? The need to praise or the lust to control other people's minds? Fear and pride are the enemy of knowledge: because of the former we withdraw from encounter and keep to the safety ofs tale formulas; and because of the latter we seek only the sort of knowledge that shores up our personality. Genuine pursuit of knowledge, by contrast, does not recoil from entering into vital relation with the nonself. It is not afraid of puzzlement and disproof, the buffeting of facts, the hard knocks of reality. And this is how the pursuit of knowledge is really the practice of love: acceptance of whatever may come, however alien or challenging or confusing it may prove to be; suspension of self-interest in approaching the world; a disposition that fosters admiration, not dogmatic bluster. Without love, science is prey to the puffing-up of egoism and self-serving fantasy that is our natural bent. Loveless knowledge is blind for it sees only what it seeks. With love, on the contrary, we see for the sake of what we see. It is not true that love is blind. Love is in fact objectivity tugging our sleeve. "I believe," Van Gogh writes in a letter, "that those who hold that no one thinks clearly when in love are wrong, for it is at just that time that one thinks very clearly, indeed is more energetic than one was before." Didier Maleuvre (2004)