Word: durants
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Other Breed. The age he lived in. Historian Will Durant suggests, suffered from the same obsessive doubt, and its great preoccupation was the confrontation of science and religion, rationalism and faith. In this book, Volume VIII of his massive The Story of Civilization, Durant explores that conflict, from the persecution of the Huguenots to the age's finest flowering in the minds of men like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibnitz...
...previous volumes, Durant scants parts of his story to speak at leisurely length of the poets, philosophers, and men of science he admires. He finds little space to discuss the great outward thrust that sent 17th century Englishmen, Frenchmen and Dutchmen around the globe. And although he writes of the statesmen and military leaders who helped shape the age-Cromwell, Marlborough, Peter the Great, Frederick William of Brandenburg-his sympathies lie with that other breed of 17th century men who made "all the motions of matter seem to fall into an order of law and the immensity of the universe...
...looked to omens and cabalistic signs as a guide to the future. The Swedish poet Georg Stiernhielm was accused of witchcraft for burning a peasant's beard with a magnifying glass, and witches would continue to stalk the lands of Europe for as long as King Louis lived (Durant reports that in Scotland the last one was sent to the stake in 1722). But at the same time, Hooke was developing the compound microscope, which transformed the study of the cell; Nicolaus Steno was studying the development of the earth's crust; Olaus Roemer was determining the velocity...
...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...