Wolf says: "The amount of intellectual food that can be got from well-digested scholarship is a very insignificant item."
In Winckelmann's youth there were no philological studies apart from the ordinary bread-winning branches of the science—people read and explained the ancients in order to prepare themselves for the better interpretation of the Bible and the Corpus Juris.
59
In Wolf's estimation, a man has reached the highest point of historical research when he is able to take a wide and general view of the whole and of the profoundly conceived distinctions in the developments in art and the different styles of art. Wolf acknowledges, however, that Winckelmann was lacking in the more common talent of philological criticism, or else he could not use it properly: "A rare mixture of a cool head and a minute and restless solicitude for hundreds of things which, insignificant in themselves, were combined in his case with a fire that swallowed up those little things, and with a gift of divination which is a vexation and an annoyance to the uninitiated."
60
Wolf draws our attention to the fact that antiquity was acquainted only with theories of oratory and poetry which facilitated production, τέχναι and artes that formed real orators and poets, "while at the present day we shall soon have theories upon which it would be as impossible to build up a speech or a poem as it would be to form a thunderstorm upon a brontological treatise."
61
Wolf's judgment on the amateurs of philological knowledge is noteworthy: "If they found themselves provided by nature with a mind corresponding to that of the ancients, or if they were capable of adapting themselves to other points of view and other circumstances of life, then, with even a nodding acquaintance with the best writers, they certainly acquired more from those vigorous natures, those splendid examples of thinking and acting, than most of those did who during their whole life merely offered themselves to them as interpreters."
62
Says Wolf again: "In the end, only those few ought to attain really complete knowledge who are born with artistic talent and furnished with scholarship, and who make use of the best opportunities of securing, both theoretically and practically, the necessary technical knowledge." True!