Word: thinker
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...calendars like some queer surrealistic fruit tree ready to drop its harvest. His thoughts were gloomy, but no trace of gloom showed on his round cherubic features which, he says, make him look like a rear view of Cupid and prevent his being taken as a serious thinker. He went home for the dinner that in Emporia comes at noon. After dinner he stretched out on his double mahogany bed that stands beneath three ivy-shaded windows, put two pillows under his head, and slept...
...book is an examination, chiefly through the Old Testament prophets and the parables of Jesus, of the roots of religion, individualism, science, human conduct, human hope. It is the work of a stonily independent amateur thinker. Winston Churchill is convinced that certain of the prophets, notably Isaiah (a collaboration) and Jesus (if he existed), had hold of a form of science, psychology and self-knowledge which all religions, including Christianity, have repudiated, and which science itself rather scorns than endorses...
...Pennsylvania in its birth was a planned society," Bates observes. To his mind Penn was a great political thinker, the Quaker Colony was democracy's brightest hope. While that prurient sadist and hypochondriac, Cotton Mather, was torturing old women for witchcraft in Massachusetts, Penn dismissed a charge of broomstick riding with the remark that there was no law in Pennsylvania against riding on broomsticks. Penn's incredibly dramatic-and in the end tragic-life has nowhere been better told...
Such hardihood was not welcome to Melville's time. But Melville had a spiritual successor in William Graham Sumner, a hardheaded thinker who began at Yale in 1872 a study he called the "science of society." Professor Gabriel is as trenchant, critical and readable on Sumner as he is on Adams, James, Royce and 19th-20th Century thinkers generally. And he rescues Sumner's importance from the forgetful obloquy it has suffered (outside New Haven) in recent years...
...explanation has been that as a journalist he lacks teaching experience. But this is no longer true. For the past two years he has taught at Williams, and has also done a good job at the Harvard Summer School. There is no doubt about his ability as an original thinker; the two books "It Is Later Than You Think" and "Ideas Are Weapons" are no mean achievement for a man of his comparatively few years. He could be a very active tutor, and would certainly be a stimulating one. It is the "middle group," assistant and associate professors, that...