Word: moralistes
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...first essay in this volume is on Locke, "the father of modern psychology," whom Mr. Santayana puts in his place in the history of thought. The second essay is on F. H. Bradley, the sturdy but mistaken moralist, for whom Mr. Santayana, unlike Mr. T. S. Eliot, does not cherish an excessively warm regard. There is, as the third essay, a highly suggestive consideration of the theory of relativity and the new physics. The suspicion is advanced that "even Einstein is an imperfect relativist, and retains Euclidean space and absolute time at the bottom of his calculation, and recovers them...
...Clarence True Wilson, Methodist moralist, and in less generous vein Dr. Francis Scott McBride for the Anti-Saloon League, promised to cooperate. Not so Mrs. Ella Alexander Boole, the bustling matriarch of the W. C. T. U., whose plan is to find horrid examples of what 3.2% beer can do and use them to club down Repeal in perhaps 16 states, three more than enough to kill it.* She replied to Crusader Clark: "I assume you wired me for publicity purposes...
...Decent conduct" cried the Red Moralist, "has nothing to do with Hell or Heaven! Instead of enforcing decent con-duct by threats of a non-existent Hell or by promises of a non-existent Heaven we must bring up our new generations to con-duct themselves decently because a comrade's own usefulness and the well-being of the nation require...
What is the significance of such a state of affairs? The over-zealous moralist will imply with gusto that the public has a genuine esteem for the perpetration of evil, and that the country is at last on its way to perdition. Such a conclusion must be rejected; the prominence given to the fabulous annals of crime admits of a more significant explanation...
...book (214 small pages) but contains 18 biographies in parvo. They are like unusually well-written, extremely urbane short stories. Some of their subjects: Elizabethan Sir John Harington, who, "suddenly inspired," invented the water-closet. Jacobean Dr. North, Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), whom illness transmogrified from a scrupulous moralist into a ribald debauchee. The Président de Brosses, the man who got the better of Voltaire over a bill for firewood. Mary Berry, last survivor of the 18th Century, who "could even make Frenchmen hold their tongues; she could even make Englishmen talk." Strachey pays his unrespectful...