Word: durants
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LOUIS XIV, by Will and Ariel Durant. In the eighth volume of their massive study of Western civilization, the Durants describe with wit and a wealth of anecdote an age preoccupied by the confrontation between rationalism and faith...
...LOUIS XIV, by Will and Ariel Durant. In the eighth volume of their massive study of Western civilization, the Durants describe with wit and a wealth of anecdote an age preoccupied by the confrontation between rationalism and faith...
...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...