The Crisis of the Modern World (The Collected Works of Rene Guenon)

by René Guénon

Modern science, arising from an arbitrary limitation of knowledge to a particular order—the lowest of all orders, that of material or sensible reality—has lost, through this limitation and the consequences it immediately entails, all intellectual value; as long, that is, as one gives to the word ‘intellectuality’ the fullness of its real meaning, and refuses to share the ‘rationalist’ error of assimilating pure intelligence to reason, or, what amount to the same thing, of completely denying intellectual intuition.

This breach with tradition calls for further comment, for it is precisely this that produced the modern world, whose characteristics could all be summed up under one single heading, namely opposition to the traditional spirit; and negation of tradition, once again, is the same as individualism. This, indeed, is in perfect accord with what has already been said, since it is intellectual intuition and pure metaphysical doctrine that constitute the very principle of every traditional civilization; once the principle is denied, all its consequences must be denied also, at least implicitly, and thereby everything that really merits the name of tradition is destroyed at one blow.

From rationalism, religion was bound to sink into sentimentalism, and it is in the Anglo-Saxon countries that the most striking examples of this are to be found. What remains is therefore no longer even a dwindling and deformed religion, but simply ‘religiosity’, that is to say vague and sentimental aspirations unjustified by any real knowledge: to this final stage correspond theories such as that of the ‘religious experience’ of William James, which goes to the point of finding in the ‘subconscious’ man’s means of entering into communication with the divine. At this stage the final products of religious and of philosophical decline mingle together and ‘religious experience’ becomes merged in pragmatism, in the name of which a limited God is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God, insofar as one can feel for him sentiments comparable to those one would feel for a higher man.