Word: cosmos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Orator Fosdick, no scientist himself, tried hard to be optimistic: ". . . This telescope can furnish our stricken society with some measure of healing perspective. This great new window to the stars will bring . . . into fresh focus the mystery of the universe, its order, its beauty, its power. ... Adrift in a cosmos whose shores he cannot even imagine, man spends his energies in fighting with his fellow man over issues which a single look through this telescope would show to be utterly inconsequential...
Daily life, says Professor Giedion, has always been a series of movements set in space. The ancient Greek falsely saw the world as the "immovable center of the cosmos," and his classical temples were expressive of eternal equilibrium. Medieval man saw the world as something set in motion by the hand of God; he found peace in rooms whose lack of furniture ("movables") gave spacious tranquillity to his austere thoughts. His dinner table was set up on a trestle, promptly removed when he had eaten. Since that time, man has come to abhor the vacuum of space: he still talks...
...like to try a twist at the tail of the cosmos," wrote the late "Great Dissenter," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, to a philosopher friend. The letters, published for the first time last week, were composed in a scrawl and were knotty with Holmesian twists...
...forever without effect on everything there will be. We are internally richer, more intense than other beings perhaps and occasionally we may have a flicker of a consciousness denied to others, but in principle we are like all other beings. Like all else we are focal points unifying the cosmos in a fresh and original way, offering ourselves as material to be unified by what else might follow, and together with all other things in this space time world, interplaying with and complementing that supreme actual occasion, God. This is a cosmology in which there is no place...
...cosmology, religion, art, ethics and civilization. In a hundred different ways it points up the limitations of language, of scholarship, of traditional science and religion, and gently but surely leads one to see that the history of civilization is but a special case of the history of a cosmos in which ideas can and sometimes do "persuade" the brute facts of life and experience to be harmonized, muted and ennobled. There is a faint but sure drive in things towards excellence which deserves to be encouraged, nursed, supported. We are civilized to the degree that we refuse to allow this...