The Age of Reason Begins: The Story of Civilization, Volume VII

by Will Durant

He relished words and explored the nooks and crannies of the language; he loved words in general and poured them forth in frolicsome abandon; if he names a flower he must go on to name a dozen—the words themselves are fragrant. He makes simple characters mouth polysyllabic circumlocutions. He plays jolly havoc with the grammar: turns nouns, adjectives, even adverbs into verbs, and verbs, adjectives, even pronouns into nouns; gives a plural verb to a singular subject or a singular verb to a plural subject;

His imagination makes his style, which thinks in images, turns all ideas into pictures, all abstractions into things felt or seen.

he felt that the world was better for a clown or two;

Shakespeare was too wise to think that a creature could analyze his creator, or that even his mind, poised on a moment of flesh, could comprehend the whole.

He speaks with no reverence of professed philosophers, and doubts that any of them ever bore the toothache patiently.

If we interpret philosophy not as metaphysics but as any large perspective of human affairs, as a generalized view not only of the cosmos and the mind but as well of morals, politics, history, and faith, Shakespeare is a philosopher, profounder than Bacon, as Montaigne is deeper than Descartes; it is not form that makes philosophy.

under every constitution the whales will eat the fish.

“I loved the man … this side idolatry.”

These are the three epochal gifts of the world’s drama, and we must, despite our limitations, welcome them all to our deepening, thanking our heritage for Greek wisdom, French beauty, and Elizabethan life. (But, of course, Shakespeare is supreme.)

She was cursed with beauty, unblessed with brains; and her character was her fate.

As one function of diplomacy is to dress realism in morality,

A bitter man but a great man, building his dream to power more complete than Calvin’s, hating heartily, fighting bravely, consuming to the last flicker the incredible energy of a tenacious will.

He and Mary divided the soul of Scotland between them: he was the Reformation, she was the Renaissance. She lost because she did not know, like Elizabeth, how to marry them.

They were both noble women: one noble and hastily emotional, the other noble and hesitantly wise. Fitly they lie near each other in Westminster Abbey, reconciled in death and peace.

He received ample education in the humanities, too much in theology and too little in morals, and he became the most learned hard drinker in Europe.

“God’s silly vassal,”

“If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that Library, and to be chained together with so many good authors and dead masters.”

Chapman never recovered from his education;

preferring “the wantonness of a wife to the coyness of a mistress.”

In 1610 he re turned to the Anglican fold, and “with such enthusiasm that he drank all the wine in the cup when he attended” Communion.44

He spent in haste and starved at leisure;

With eccentric humor Rabelaisian only in its pathless wandering, he discusses everything as casually as Montaigne, peppering his pages with Latin and Greek, and genially beckoning his reader on and on to nowhere. He disclaims originality; he feels that all authorship is pilfering: “We can say nothing but what has been said; the composition and method is ours only.”

Children came as easily as rhymes;

in the new astronomy, a mere “suburb” of the world.

His verse is rough, but he wished it so; he rejected the affected graces of Elizabethan speech, and relished unworn words and arresting prosody; he liked harsh discords that could be resolved into unwonted harmonies.

“whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.”

“This,” he said, “is a fair sharp medicine to cure me of all diseases and miseries.”

“the wisest fool in Christendom.”

Better the King James Bible than a conqueror’s crown.

ARE people poor because they are ignorant, or ignorant because they are poor?

In societies knowledge grows, and superstition wanes, with the increase and distribution of wealth.

To the poor in body and mind superstition is a treasured element in the poetry of life, gilding dull days with exciting marvels, and redeeming misery with magic powers and mystic hopes.

But he gave no “hostages to fortune”

He wrote like a philosopher and lived like a prince. He saw no reason why reason should be penniless, or why Solomon should not be king.

“I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these 200 years.”31

William Harvey said of Bacon that he “wrote philosophy like a lord chancellor”;38 yes, and planned it like an imperial general.

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much, and so much only, as he had observed, in fact or in thought, of the course of Nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything … Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the course is not known, the effect cannot be produced. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Therefore we must, at the start, clear our minds, so far as we can, of all preconceptions, prejudices, assumptions, and theories; we must turn away even from Plato and Aristotle; we must sweep out of our thought the “idols,” or time-honored illusions and fallacies, born of our personal idiosyncrasies of judgment or the traditional beliefs and dogmas of our group; we must banish all logical tricks of wishful thinking, all verbal absurdities of obscure thought. We must put behind us all those majestic deductive systems of philosophy which proposed to draw a thousand eternal verities out of a few axioms and principles. There is no magic hat in science; everything taken from the hat in works must first be put into it by observation or experiment. And not by mere casual observation, nor by “simple enumeration” of data, but by “experience … sought for, experiment.”

faith might hold to beliefs for which science and philosophy could find no evidence, but philosophy should depend only on reason, and science should seek purely secular explanations in terms of physical cause and effect.

Love is a madness, and marriage is a noose.

Friendship is better than love, and married men make unsteady friends.

Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.69

He had preserved the fowl—but he lost his life.

He was not, as Pope thought, “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.”73 Montaigne was wiser, Voltaire brighter, Henry VIII meaner; and Bacon’s enemies called him kindly, helpful, and quick to forgive.

Francis Bacon was the most powerful and influential intellect of his time. Shakespeare, of course, stood above him in imagination and literary art; but Bacon’s mind ranged over the universe like a searchlight peering and prying curiously into every corner and secret of space.

Verbere sed audi [Strike me if you will, only hear me];

That extraordinary genius, at a time when it was impossible to write a history of what was known, wrote one of what it was necessary to learn.”

Year by year the English economy was changing its base and fulcrum from static land to movable money.

A pamphlet entitled Hell Broke Loose: A Catalogue of the Many Spreading Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of These Times (1646) cited, as the first heresy, the opinion “that the Scripture, whether a true manuscript [an authentic text] or no … is but humane [man-made], and not able to discover [reveal] a divine God.”

The ways that lead us to … any knowledge … are but two: first, experience, secondly ratiocination. They that come and tell you what to believe, what you are to do, and tell you not why, they are not physicians but leeches … The chiefest sinew and strength of wisdom is not easily to believe….