Word: rationalist
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...draws is fantastic, but only slightly more so than the real one. Germany is called Armagnac; Paris, Sybaris; everyone is spied on by an agency of the Western alliance called the Office of Strategic Information. Science is a weapon for soldiers, not a tool of philosophers. A power-warped rationalist named Elliot, who strongly resembles the villainous Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, speculates with pleasure on "the electronics of the soul"-soon, he promises, cyberneticists will know enough about mechanical brains to control human nerve cells with ease. "We are moving," someone says, "toward a new Middle...
...ancient myth Pygmalion breathes life into his statue Galatea through love. It was typical of Bernard Shaw, one of the last of the great 19th century rationalist optimists, that in his Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle into existence. Give Shaw an actress, a breed he regarded as intrinsically brainless, and the sage would begin playing post office, or frequently postcard. Absence definitely made Shaw's heart grow fonder, and for added emotional insurance the women were al ways married, as was he. The two most celebrated of these epistolary romances involved Mrs. Pat Campbell and Ellen Terry...
...natural law? The Founding Fathers certainly accepted the concept, in one form or another, much of it having reached them through the English common law out of the vast reservoir of Christian tradition. Murray thinks that the Bill of Rights was far less a "piece of 18th century rationalist theory [than] the product of Christian history." In fact, to some it may seem that Murray at times regards the U.S. as having sprung directly from medieval Christianity-he calls St. Thomas "The First Whig"-with hardly any help from Protestantism or the Enlightenment...
What caused its decline is chiefly a combination of Protestant theology and modern rationalist philosophy. "The new rationalism," as Murray describes the thought of men like John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, sees man as autonomous, beneath no knowable God, with...
Burdened Conscience. The heirs to that tradition face a momentous choice today, as Murray sees it. The modern rationalist and pragmatist experiment, he feels, has failed. That experiment tried to carry on Western liberalism, whose roots are Christian, without Christianity. The individual conscience, lacking religion to inform...