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The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses.
it is not the mysterious fact of the world’s existence which interests the new man but explanations of how the world works.
Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and-consuming animal.
Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil.
Hysterical optimism is a great phrase.
The apostles of modernism usually begin their retort with catalogues of modern achievement, not realizing that here they bear witness to their immersion in particulars. We must remind them that we cannot begin to enumerate until we have defined what is to be sought or proved. It will not suffice to point out the inventions and processes of our century unless it can be shown that they are something other than a splendid efflorescence of decay.
one can tell from certain newspaper columns and radio programs that the average man has become imbued with this notion and imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts!
In a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them and they are continuously exposed to manipulation by controllers of the printing machine
If the disposition is wrong, reason increases maleficence; if it is right, reason orders and furthers the good.
precultural periods are characterized by formlessness and post-cultural by the clashing of forms.
Man is in the world to suffer his passion; but wisdom comes to his relief with an offer of conventions, which shape and elevate that passion.
A plebeian distrust of forms, flowering in eulogies of plainness, became the characteristic American mentality.
Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent.
some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.
Barbarism and Philistinism cannot see that knowledge of material reality is a knowledge of death.
ever seeking to widen its field in accordance with the canon of progress, makes a virtue of desecration.
“if one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
The machine cannot be a respecter of sentiment, and it was no accident that the great parade of obscenity followed hard upon the technification of our world.
The empirical character of British philosophy cannot be unrelated to the commercial habit of a great trading nation.
The refusal to see distinction between babe and adult, between the sexes, between combatant and noncombatant—distinctions which lay at the core of chivalry—the determination to weld all into a formless unit of mass and weight—this is the destruction of society through brutality.
The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society.
Since both knowledge and virtue require the concept of transcendence, they are really obnoxious to those committed to material standards,
Let us remember that traditional society was organized around king and priest, soldier and poet, peasant and artisan. Now distinctions of vocation fade out, and the new organization, if such it may be termed, is to be around capacities to consume. Underlying the shift is the theory of romanticism; if we attach more significance to feeling than to thinking, we shall soon, by a simple extension, attach more to wanting than to deserving.
socialism, which is itself the materialistic offspring of bourgeois capitalism. It clarifies much to see that socialism is in origin a middle-class and not a proletarian concept.
Loving comfort, risking little, terrified by the thought of change, its aim is to establish a materialistic civilization which will banish threats to its complacency. It has conventions, not ideals; it is washed rather than clean. The plight of Europe today is the direct result of the bourgeois ascendancy and its corrupted world view.
If one dares to visualize the millennium of the social democrats, he is forced to picture a “healthy-minded,” naturally good man, provided for by a paternalistic state and seeking to save himself from extinction by boredom through dabbling in some art.
“Comfort becomes a goal when distinctions of rank are abolished and privileges destroyed.”
conservatives should treat as enemies all those who wish to abolish the sacred and secular grounds for distinctions among men.
the most insidious idea employed to break down society is an undefined equalitarianism.
The comity of peoples in groups large or small rests not upon this chimerical notion of equality but upon fraternity, a concept which long antedates it in history because it goes immeasurably deeper in human sentiment. The ancient feeling of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood is status in family, and family is by nature hierarchical. It demands patience with little brother, and it may sternly exact duty of big brother. It places people in a network of sentiment, not of rights—that hortus siccus of modern
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How much of the frustration of the modern world proceeds from starting with the assumption that all are equal, finding that this cannot be so, and then having to realize that one can no longer fall back on the bond of fraternity!
all teleology rejects “freedom from” in favor of “freedom to.”
if the primary need of man is to perfect his spiritual being and prepare for immortality, then education of the mind and the passions will take precedence over all else. The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehensible to the majority. Those who maintain that education should prepare one for living successfully in this world have won a practically complete victory.
They have built colleges on an equal scale, only to see them turned into playgrounds for grown-up children or centers of vocationalism and professionalism.
Finally, they have seen pragmatists, as if in peculiar spite against the very idea of hierarchy, endeavoring to turn classes into democratic forums, where the teacher is only a moderator, and no one offends by presuming to speak with superior knowledge.
economic man, whose destiny is mere activity.
one does not require a particular standpoint to comprehend the timeless. Let us remember all the while that the very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper.
Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed; and one deformed is the last person to be thought of as a ruler;
Where fact is made the criterion, knowledge has been rendered unattainable.
People tend to trust the judgments of an integrated personality and will prefer them even to the official opinions of experts. They rightly suspect that expertise conceals some abnormality of viewpoint.
Just so does modern industrial and political organization, which is irrational hierarchy, make the citizen an ethical eunuch.
These corrupt bureaucracies are contemptuous of the people, in whose name they so piously speak.
there is another way in which science and its metaphysical handmaiden, progress, discourage sanity. This is its exaltation of “becoming” over “being.”
those who are in rebellion against memory are the ones who wish to live without knowledge;
The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages.
Like peace, regeneration carries a price which those who think of it idly will balk at.
As One views modern man in his innumerable exhibitions of irresponsibility and defiance, one may discern, if he has the courage to see what he sees—which, as Charles Péguy reminded us, is the higher courage—a prodigious egotism.
Since under conditions of modern freedom the individual thinks only of his rights, he does not refer his action to the external frame of obligation.
