Word: durant
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...Durant is at his best in his cogent, detailed discussion of that oddly reactionary heretic, Baruch Spinoza, who by conceiving of the universe as one elemental, infinite substance, indivisible from God, finally achieved what the age had not thought possible-an accommodation between science and religion...
Hopes & Fears. Among historians, Durant is the great anecdotist. Catherine, Queen to England's Charles II and a lady to her fingertips, finds the King disheveled in his chambers, notices a slipper beside the bed and graciously withdraws "lest the pretty little fool hiding behind the curtains should catch cold." Peter the Great, greeted by the King of France before the royal palace, graciously picks up his host and carries him up the steps like an infant...
...integral method," no minor poet or scientist is dismissed as irrelevant in presenting the age in "total perspective." Yet perspective is exactly what Durant lacks. Thus he can declare that "the greatest Italian painters were now in Naples, everything flourished-music, art, literature, politics, drama, hunger, murder, and always the gay, furious, melodious pursuit of feminine curves by agitated men." But he never seems aware that the "great" Neapolitan painters were at best secondary talents, and that the true center of painting had shifted elsewhere-to The Nether lands and France...
...Durant specifically denies himself absolute judgments. His gently rationalistic view of history holds that "there is some truth in every passion, something to be loved in every foe." But with typical diffidence, Durant pronounces the age of Louis a hopeful one. "The mood of Europe was changing from supernaturalism to secularism, from theology to science, from hopes of heaven and fears of hell to plans for the enlargement of knowledge...
...Durant and his wife Ariel, who has assisted with research on all the volumes, will continue to trace what Durant calls "the faltering trajectory of mankind" through Volumes IX and X -The Age of Voltaire in 1965, and Rousseau and Revolution in 1968. Provided, says Will Durant dryly, that "the Great Powers do not destroy our subject before it destroys...