All truly serious study must have a personal purpose. The student, therefore, must first of all be able to define what he is looking for in the study, and how he expects it to impact his intellectual trajectory. This is equivalent to saying that serious study must be based on a genuine, personal interest, the greater the distance from which, the more useless the result of the study itself. It is true that one cannot predict how fruitful it will be, nor what paths it will lead to, because, in short, these will be part of the answers that will come to what one is looking for; but, in short, when one is not looking for anything, one cannot evaluate what one has achieved.