The Seekers Quotes

“Toynbee offers his own explanation of how and why societies survive and prosper. It is the leadership of "creative minorities" that keeps societies alive and flourishing. But when the "creative" minority becomes a "dominant" minority, imposing its will by force and oppression, then poletariats (internal and external) are created and the society disintegrates. Though fervent and profuse with the data of his "English empiricism," Toynbee still developed his own mystique to replace "destiny." The real progress of a civilization consists in what Toynbee calls "etherialization"-"an overcoming of material obstacles which releases the energy of the society to make responses to challenges which henceforth are internal rather than external, spiritual rather than material.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Despite Acton's optimism about the long-term future of humankind, he raised the alarm against ideas and institutions of his time that menaced the liberty that was the proper human destiny. The most serious was the racism recently advanced by the French Orientalist Joseph Gobineau. Acton attacked racism as "one of the many schemes to deny free will, responsibility, and guilt, and to supplant moral by physical forces." "Nationality," newly flourishing in Europe in Acton's day, was a similar diversion of the great current of human liberty. "The progress of civilization depends on transcending Nationality....Influences which are accidental yield to those which are rational....The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom." And the State (as in Bismarck's Prussia)-the modern fellow conspirator of Nationalism-was "a vast abstraction above all other things" (invented, he said, by Machiavelli), which oppressed all its subjects and consumed their lives.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Inspiring all Holmes's championship of free expression was his seeking spirit, his doubt that he or anyone had an avenue to the absolute. "The great act of faith," he wrote to his friend William James (who hardly needed the advice), "is when man decides that he is not God." On his ninetieth birthday he was still reminding young men that his "discovery I was not God" was his "secret of success.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“For Toynbee, finally, the "higher religions" displaced societies or civilizations as the units that gave meaning to history. While brashly insisting on his naively English empirical reliance on facts, which he amassed in prodigious quantity, still in his personal quest for salvation he had developed his own universal apocalyptic view. His reassurance of universal salvation had wide appeal in an age of two world wars. Scholars have objected less to Toynbee's vague definitions of society and civilization than to his tendency to simplify the study of history into a branch of theodicy-an answer to Job, a science of justifying God's ways to man.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Religions played an increasingly dominant role in Toynbee's view as he grew older and advanced with his "Study of History." "The principal cause of war in our world today." he wrote on Apirl 9, 1935, in the Manchester Guardian, "is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities of states. This tribe-worship is the oldest religion of mankind, and it has only been overcome in so far as human beings have been genuinely converted to Christianity or one of the other higher religions....The spirit of man abhors a spiritual vacuum....People will sacrifice themselves for the 'Third Reich' ir wgatever tge Ersatz-Gotzen may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God." After 1937, Toynbee flirted with Catholicism and he came to believe that the meaning of history would be revealed only in the slow and painful clarification of the relation between God and man.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“The elementary notion, what gave Toynbee's work its popular appeal, was readily capsuled in the ideas of "challenge" and "response.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“I became aware," Toynbee recalled, "of a difference in national traditions. Where the German a priori method drew blank, let us see what could be done by English empiricism."

Focusing on the genesis and survival of societies, his original approach was eminently practical and fact-oriented. He started with an intriguing paradox. "The view that certain environments, presenting easy and comfortable conditions of life, provide the key to an explanation of the origin of civilizations is examined and rejected." Instead he "suggests the possibility that man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make hitherto unprecedented effort." Both sides of the paradox are supported by facts from around the earth:”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Cultures are organisms," Spengler explains, "and world-history is their collective biography." Like any other vital organism, then, each culture goes through the stages of youth, maturity, and decline. "Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history." "Every Culture has its own Civilization...The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture....Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." Thus, while the culture is a period of ebullient creativity, the civilization that inevitably follows is a period of reflection, organization, and search for material comfort and convenience. For example, classical Greece was the culture; imperial Rome the civilization. From the beauties of Greek poetry to the imperialism of Roman law, we now live in the civilization of Western ("Faustian") culture and cannot avoid the consequences. Among these Spengler foresaw the "megalopolis," the city of faceless masses, the omnipotence of money, and a new Caesarism.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Spengler's book is rich in these "morphological relationships" between dissimilar activities that prove the coherent spirit of each culture and epoch. So there was a common spirit int eh ancient Greek polis and in Euclidean geometry, as there was also between the differential calculus and the state of Louis XIV. Chronological "contemporaneity" was misleading. It should be replaced by an understanding of how different events play similar roles in expressing the culture spirit. Thus he sees his own kind of "contemporaneity" in the Trojan War and the Crusades, in Homer and the songs of the Nibelungs.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“The acknowledged American leader of the new science of anthropology, Boas was a scrupulous master of detail drawn from his field experience. Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man (1911; revised and enlarged in 1938) demonstrated that "there is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man." He attacked simplistic racial stereotypes and insisted that "A close connection between race and personality has never been established." His conclusions were firmly based on facts gathered in the field. Boas argued that all surviving societies show equally the capacity to develop culture. They have evolved equally but differently. So he diverted the social scientists' focus from biology (the realism of evolution) to anthropology. And he received the accolade of the German Nazis when they burned his books and rescinded his German Ph.D.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“If, as Ricardo had argued, all economic value was derived from human labor, then the capitalist prospered by paying workers less than the value that they had added and pocketing the difference. To secure the maximum profit, the capitalist paid the worker only enough for his subsistence. Surplus value, then, is the value produced by the worker beyond what he is compensated. Thus the capitalist's profit came from the exploiting the worker. Although unequivocal in his dogmas of history and of economics, Marx's lively mind occasionally rebelled at hints of orthodoxy. And he more than once declared, "I am not a Marxist.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Progress, for Comte, unlike Condorcet, is not indefinite, but continuous. And there is no room for surprise or the whims of personal liberty. It was no wonder, then, that the doctrines of Enlightenment and social science, touted to liberate man from the tyranny of the priesthood, would soon establish their own tyranny. Comte and his successors could not imagine that their gospel of progress might prove as ephemeral as the fictions of theologians or the abstractions of metaphysicians.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“In Emile the child was to be kept from books-except one, Robinson Crusoe, which Rousseau called "the happiest treatise of natural education." "Children begin by being helped, end by being served," he warned. They become masters, using their tears as prayers. The teacher must guide without seeming to, must never use corporal punishment, but must provide situations in which the child can learn for himself. The teacher, too, must know the stages of a child's development and introduce subjects only when the child is emotionally prepared. At the age of twelve the pupil must learn a useful trade. "Emile must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher in order not to be as lazy as a savage." Not until the age of eighteen should Emile turn to moral science and religion, and then he can choose his religion. For "at an age when all is mystery there can be no mysteries properly speaking." The child must have compassion, "love those who have it, but fly from the pious believers." But also shun the philosophers ("angry wolves"), who are "ardent missionaries of atheism and very imperious dogmatics who will not endure without fury that one might think differently from them.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“For Rosseau, then, education would have to be a way not of instilling the ideals of civilization but rather of liberating the young from civilization and its evils.

Much of the program he described in his didactic novel Emile is what he calls "negative education," an antidote and inoculation against the pervasive evils of civilization. It has come to be called "The Child's Charter"-a basis for modern child psychology. And it would be the prospectus and statement of principles for "progressive education" in the United States, led by John Dewey (1859-1952), who conceived it as a way of bringing democracy into the classroom (The School and Society, 1899; Democracy and Education, 1916). The movement attended tot he child's physical and emotional as well as his intellectual development, favored "learning by doing," and encouraged experimental and independent thinking. The teacher, then, aimed not at instilling a body of knowledge but at developing the pupil's own skill at learning from experience.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“The invading king, Utopus, had found the island easy to conquer "because the different sects were too busy fighting one another to oppose him,....he decreed that every man might cultivate the religion of his choice, and might proselytize for it, provided he did so quietly, modestly, and rationally and without bitterness toward others. If persuasions failed, no man was allowed to resort to abuse or violence under penalty of exile or enslavement." The king Utopus, "because he suspected that God perhaps likes various forms of worship and has therefore deliberately inspired different people with different views," allowed the widest toleration. "The only exception he made was a positive and strict law against any person who should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul perishes with the body, or that the universe is ruled by chance, rather than divine providence.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Herodotus also repeatedly reports the prophetic power of dreams, though he leaves the reader to judge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“The followers of Arius (born c. 250) believed that Christ, being the most perfect creature in the material world, had been "adopted" by God as a son. And the view had been spread by Arius' popular poetic work, Thalia ("Banquet"), which led to Arius' condemnation by the bishops as a heretic, and his exile from his post as priest in Alexandria. Constantine betrayed his own theological innocence when he called this dispute "a fight over trifling and foolish verbal differences.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“He, too, was unable to escape the yearning for changelessness in a world of change, which Plato had so elegantly embodied in his theory of forms. The concluding Book of his Physics aims to show that motion, like time, "always was and always will be"-"an immortal never-failing property of things that are, a sort of life as it were to all naturally constituted things." Which set the stage for Aristotle's God-the Unmoved Mover. This may have been as much a deference to common sense-the prevalent views of his community-as to logic or evidence. The Unmoved Mover was his name for the most divine being accessible to man. Since the activity of God was thought, it was also man's highest faculty.

"That which is capable of receiving the object of thought, is mind, and it is active when it possesses it. This activity therefore rather than the capability appears as the divine element in mind, and contemplation the pleasantest and best activity. If then God is for ever in that good state which we reach occasionally it is a wonderful thing-if in a better state, more wonderful still. Yet it is so. Life too he has, for the activity of the mind is life, and he is that activity. His essential activity is his life, the best life and eternal. We say then that God is an eternal living being, the best of all, attributing to him continuous and eternal life. That is God."

Even in describing the Unmoved Mover, Aristotle makes activity his ideal.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“But for Aristotle the meaning was hidden in the particulars of experience. The scope of his work was itself witness to his belief in the unity of experience and his confidence that it could somehow be encompassed by the human mind. And so he confirms his axiom that "the actuality of thought is life.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Plato's Academy, formally organized as a religious guild, had the aura of a great spirit reaching out to all listeners. But Aristotle's legacy was a body of knowledge, marking the path of modern learning-accumulating the facts of the world and human experience with an explanation of causes. Aristotle's legacy, then, was not the power of a charismatic personality of grand poetic gifts, but rather the accumulation of a lifetime of scholarly observation. And before Aristotle's writings were recovered by Andronicus, there were centuries of opportunity for his ideas to be distorted. Plato's was an unbroken tradition, Aristotle's was a series of renaissances.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“The state arises, Socrates explains, "out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants." Division of labor then provides the needed services, while allowing each person to do what he is best fitted for. So the community has farmers, weavers, builders, merchants, shoemakers, and all the rest. And as the state expands to meet multiplying wants, it must have a standing army. Yet, until the refinements of culture have been added, this is no better than a "city of pigs.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

“and the simple faith of Yahweh. In the Book of Amos we hear God’s terrifying judgment on Israel, and foresee its destruction by fire and famine if its people do not repent. “There will be wailing and cries of sorrow in the city streets. Even farmers will be called to mourn the dead along with those who are paid to mourn. There will be wailing in all the vineyards. All this will take place because I am coming to punish you.” The Lord has spoken. . . . For you it will be a day of darkness and not of light. It will be like a man who runs from a lion and meets a bear! Or like a man who comes home and puts his hand on the wall—only to be bitten by a snake! (Amos 5:16-19) The people of Israel must choose their way. “Make it your aim to do what is right, not what is evil, so”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World