The tension between autonomy and expertise had been, at a basic level, fundamental to the Protestant experience itself from the Reformation forward, as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, increasing literacy, and vernacular translations ...
The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessar...
AN IMPERIALIST POWER THAT ACTS ON ITS OWN REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD THINKS. 18–29 30–49 50–64 65+ Improper/Somewhat improper 86% 73 69 67 Somewhat proper/Proper 3 13 20 17 No other group we studied—not Democrats generally, not ...
Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being...
Thought is uncontrollable but controllable. Thought is the pivot of life and the epitome of good or bad living. A controlled thought is a controlled life and an uncontrolled life is an uncontrolled living. Our first and last thoughts from dawn to dus...
I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ri...
The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery sl...
Upon the whole, Chymistry is as yet but an opening science, closely connected with the useful and ornamental arts, and worthy the attention of the liberal mind. And it must always become more and more so: for though it is only of late, that it has be...
Sorry is the day, and full of lament, when the young have to guard themselves from being food for the old. I am moved to bewilderment, when I glance my eyes upon a society that kills its young, and then pretends to mourn their modus operandi. Worse s...
The notion that we've made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat of such violent force behind it, all law...
Progress had not invaded, science had not enlightened, the little hamlet of Pieuvrot, in Brittany. They were a simple, ignorant, superstitious set who lived there, and the luxuries of civilization were known to them as little as its learning. They to...
Although secular fundamentalist “progressives” might believe in a future “golden age,” such an age does not exist. The future that they herald is merely one of gathering gloom and ever darkening clouds. This fate has ever been so for those wh...
We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inve...
Norther Winslow: I've been working on this poem for 12 years. Young Ed Bloom: Really? Norther Winslow: There's a lot of expectation. I don't wanna disappoint my fans. Young Ed Bloom: May I? Young Ed Bloom: [Edward reeds the poem on the notebook ] The...
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a re...
One may take the line that metaphorical devices are inevitable in the early stages of any science and that although we may look with amusement today upon the “essences,” “forces,” “phlogistons,” and “ethers,” of the science of yesterd...
Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and char...
The widest cause of secularization may be the steady change of thinking so that there is the expectation that reason and a consideration of cause and effect will help with explanations. Supernatural power began to be removed from explanations of the ...
We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only d...
When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt b...
121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces 122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography 123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The ...
