Word: nots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Alas, indignant--or prurient--revisionism does not work with a fine pencil. Thomas Jefferson amounted to something infinitely more important--and more interesting--than one would know from the noise and scandal obscuring his achievement now.
Newton is the man of the century for this reason: by imagining--and proving--a rational universe, he in effect redesigned the human mind. Newton gave it not only intellectual tools undreamed of before, but with them, unprecedented self-confidence and ambition. If Shakespeare incomparably enlarged humanity's conception of...
In a sense, of course, Newton's was the greatest magic of all: the thought (owing something to alchemy) that for all phenomena of nature and society, there must be not only a discoverable secret but a generalization with the force of law--a solution to every problem, scientific, social...
The Newtonian heritage to us, in any case, is pervasive. W.H. Auden in 1939 wrote lines that might have been composed about, say, Kosovo last winter: "I and the world know/ what every schoolboy learns./ Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return." What is that but Newton...
The onslaught is unfair. But even ardent Jeffersonians admit that the man was an insoluble puzzle. The contradictions in his character and his ideas could be breathtaking. That the author of the Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal") not only owned and worked slaves at Monticello but also...