Word: barzun
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Dates: during 1941-1941
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...simplest comparison of the three materialists is made in Barzun's chapter, The Triumph of the Absolute...
Some three-fourths of Author Barzun's book is taken up with biographical sketches of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, which serve as background for the development of their ideas. Barzun describes Darwin's difficulties in getting famed British Publisher John Murray to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (a title whose four great phrases seem to Barzun "a stroke of genius...
Darwin's discovery was "evolution by natural selection from accidental variations." The dynamite, says Author Barzun, was in the phrase "from accidental variations." Reason: it denied the role of God in the universe, ruled out a purpose in existence, made men mere puppets of mechanical forces. Author Barzun confesses that his mind is still "paralyzed with enchantment" when he considers Darwin's theory...
From each of these isms, says Author Barzun, people learned that "the riddle of the Sphinx had been solved." The solution might be a little technical and complicated. "Yet at bottom lay a simple principle" - the survival of the fittest, the theory of value and surplus value, the leitmotiv and its function. "The public could thus enjoy the double pleasure of simpleness and profundity. . . . Physical struggle led to survival, physical labor to value, physical object to musical theme, and at the end each system yielded the most exalted objects of contemplation; the adaptation of living forms; a perfect state...
...doing this, Author Barzun believes, "the dogma and the confusion have plunged us into a state of scientific piety where we dare not call our soul our own." For this Barzun has some antidotes: 1) he would send science back to the field of technology where it belongs; 2) he would rescue purpose from the debris of late 19th-Century materialism. He thinks it was left to our century to do this job. He is not too sure it will succeed: "the possibilities which Henry Adams foresaw seem likely to come true all at once; cynical pessimism among the leaders...