Word: theys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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But by British university standards, many "could not... either read or write...Somewhere in their early education there was a failure to order, to connect, and to discriminate... they read rapidly, desperately, and far too much ... and the result was often a fearful intellectual congestion from which many of them...
Referring to the guilt complex of many intellectuals who are "painfully aware of the social and economic miseries of their society" Berlin admits that the claims of social welfare are "indeed urgent, yet they must not be allowed to absorb the whole of life."
It is an alarming spectacle, he continues, to find scholars who have a genuine devotion to some "pure" subject (medieval art, for example) hounded by the feeling that they must pay the price for their "wicked self-indulgence" by participating in a "useful activity" which they may find distasteful. "Unless...
"I feel sure that neither Michelangelo nor Mozart, neither Newton nor Hume nor Gauss nor Einstein gave a conscious thought to social consequences while they were engaged in their labors.
"When I tried to suggest to my more socially conscious American students that intellectual curiosity was not necessarily a form of sin or even frivolity and that a possible valid reason for pursuing this or that branch of knowledge was merely that they were interested in it.... I could see...