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

by Will Durant

Modern literature owes something of its wit and subtlety to censorship.

In that war for the conquest of knowledge the central battle is that of life against death—a battle which individually is always lost and collectively is regularly won.

Goethe’s generous saying that a man’s defects are the faults of his time, while his virtues are his own.

I would dare to publish my speculations if there were more people like you.88

“I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

“Eppur si muove!” (And yet it does move!), is a legend not traceable before 1761.115

his book did not recant.

“This universe,” he said, “that I have extended a thousand times … has now shrunk to the narrow confines of my own body. Thus God likes it; so I too must like it.”

In 1835 the Church withdrew the works of Galileo from her Index of Prohibited Books. The broken and defeated man had triumphed over the most powerful institution in history.

Is Christianity dying? Is the religion that gave morals, courage, and art to Western civilization suffering slow decay through the spread of knowledge, the widening of astronomic, geographical, and historical horizons, the realization of evil in history and the soul, the decline of faith in an afterlife and of trust in the benevolent guidance of the world? If this is so, it is the basic event of modern times, for the soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

the new morality shamed the old theology.

Religion was a casualty in the wars of religion.

only a bubble and a moment in a universe immeasurably too vast for the jealous, vengeful deity of Genesis?

laughed at the Last Judgment, which took so long in coming, and at hell, which was probably not so terrible after all, since all the jolliest company gathered there.1

“Our knowledge is asininity, our certainties are fictions, our whole world is … a perpetual comedy.”

“Amongst that infinity of religions there is no man who does not believe that he possesses the true and condemns all the rest.”

“readier to recommend him to others than to retain his services,”

“For love of true wisdom,” he said, “and zeal for true contemplation, I tire, torment, and crucify myself.”

If philosophy means calm perspective, reasoned restraint, ability to see all sides, tolerance of difference, even sympathy for simpletons, Bruno was not a philosopher but a warrior, who put on blinders lest surrounding dangers should divert him from his goal—which was, two centuries before Voltaire, écraser l’infâme to smash the infamy of obscurantism and persecution.

even in the skies panta rei, all things flow. Space, time, and motion are relative; there is no center, no circumference, no up or down; the same motion differs when seen from different places or stars; and as time is the measure of motion, time too is relative.

“It is Unity that enchants me. By her power I am free though thrall, happy in sorrow, rich in poverty, alive even in death.”

(Though I am subject to law, I express my own nature; though I suffer, I find solace in recognizing that the “evil” of the part becomes meaningless in the perspective of the whole; though I die, the death of the part is the rejuvenating life of the whole.)

“Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.”36

“Andiamo, andiamo allegramente a morire da filosofo” (Let us go, let us go cheerfully to die like a philosopher).

Tommaso Campanella

The people is a beast of muddy brain That knows not its own force and therefore stands Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein. One kick would be enough to break the chain; But the beast fears, and what the child demands It does, nor its own terror understands, Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain. Most wonderful, with its own hand it ties And gags itself—gives itself death and war For pence doled out by kings from its own store. Its own are all things between earth and heaven, But this it knows not; and if one arise To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.41

“I am the bell [campanella],” he said, “that announces the new dawn.”46

Democracy, in Mariana’s view, is made impossible by the unequal distribution of ability and intelligence among men. It would be ruinous to let policy be determined by plebiscites.

He believed that the study of history is the beginning of political wisdom.

the philosophic mind does not mature early.

no government is sovereign if it is subject to any laws but those of Nature and of God.64

Democracies have only briefly ruled states. They go to pieces on the fickleness of the people and the incompetence and venality of popularly elected officials.

The salvation of democracy is that behind the pretense of equality only a small minority rules, and the balance of brains outweighs the count of heads.66

Bodin, like Hobbes, was a frightened man trying to reason his way to stability amid the flux of revolution and war.

But war is unjust if it is waged for conquest, for plunder or land, or from the real or pretended desire to impose a beneficent government upon a people unwilling to receive it.

might does not make right, but it makes law.

but Pierre was so amiable a youth, so modest in conduct, so regular in his religious duties, that nobody seems to have thought of burning him.

Throughout his life he professed the doctrine of the “two truths”—that the conclusions apparently compelled by reason could be accepted in philosophy, while in religion one might still follow the orthodox faith and ritual as an obedient son of the Church. Gassendi ate his cake and had it.

“In the Temple were forged the hammers which destroyed the Temple.”78

“I think, therefore I am”

though he was mistaken in declaring that a vacuum existed nowhere except in Pascal’s head.

Bene vixit qui bene latuit—”He has lived well who has hidden well”;

The Cartesian doubt did for France—for the Continent in general—what Bacon had done for England: it freed philosophy from the barnacles of time and set it bravely sailing the open sea, even if, in Descartes, it soon returned to safe and familiar ports.

Love reason, then; let your writings ever derive from it alone their luster and their worth.”)