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  • Scarmoge posted an update 6 years, 12 months ago

    An interesting thought or two in this book. Here is one example …
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    There is, indeed, a deep sickness which infects the soul of modern man. It is an illness a la mode, and therefore everyone of any consequence seeks to identify himself with it and to flaunt its symptoms. If we are to explain it in terms of the history of ideas, we must say that we have arrived at the conclusion of two great developments of thought. We stand at the tail-end of rationalism and at the tail-end of romanticism. The name for the end of the first is positivism. The name for the end of the second is existentialism. A few social scientists, a few professors of jurisprudence, and most philosophers of logic and of scientific method prefer the first tail-end. Artists, novelists, psychologists, and religionists prefer the second tail-end. In the past ten years or fifteen years there have been lively disputes between the two groups as to which of them had a firm grasp on reality. Only recently has it come into the consciousness of some persons that these two sects are not apprehending reality; they are running away from it.

    Both are afraid of life. … In each of these so-called movements of thought, the idolatry of the ego, the solipsism, of modern man, assumes an air of monstrous sophistication whereby it pretends to be wrestling with reality when it is only energetically massaging itself. (p. 28)

    Fitch, Robert Elliot – Odyssey of the Self-Centered Self or Rakes Progress in Religion
    Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1960/61.

    Fitch’s “Voltaire’s Philosophic Procedure” is an interesting read as well.