All which our ordinary students, right well perceiving in the universities, how unprofitable these poetical, mathematical, and philosophical studies are, how little respected, how few patrons; apply themselves in all haste to those three commodious professions of law, physic, and divinity, sharing themselves between them, rejecting these arts in the mean time, history, philosophy, philology, or lightly passing them over, as pleasant toys fitting only table-talk, and to furnish them with discourse.
Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part.I Memb.3 Sect.2 Subsect. 15
Love of learning, study in excess, with a digression, of the misery of scholars, and why the Muses are melancholy.
Now if I am only allowed to substitute business schools for divinity…
And another quick thought – we must be standing now on the edge of the new breakthrough. Can’t wait to see what it will be this time. The fact that history and philology didn’t just plunge headlong last time does bring up some hopes for the future.
