Footnote 5: [(return) ]
The Critique of Practical Reason (tr. T.K. Abbott), p. 260.
Footnote 6: [(return) ]
The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 702.
Footnote 7: [(return) ]
H.T.R., vol. I, no. 1, p. 18.
Footnote 8: [(return) ]
Anthropologie, para. 87 c.
Footnote 9: [(return) ]
P. 32.
Footnote 10: [(return) ]
Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, p. 322.
CHAPTER THREE
Eating, Drinking and Being Merry
We ventured to say in the preceding chapter that, under the influences of more than three centuries of humanism, the spiritual solidarity of mankind is breaking down. For humanism makes an inhuman demand upon the will; it minimizes the force of the subrational and it largely ignores the superrational elements in human experience; it does not answer enough questions. Indeed, it is frankly confessed, particularly by students of the political and economic forces now working in society, that the new freedom born in the Renaissance is, in some grave sense, a failure. It destroyed what had been the common moral authority of European civilization in its denial of the rule of the church. But for nearly four centuries it has become increasingly clear that it offered no adequate substitute for the supernatural moral and religious order which it supplanted. John Morley was certainly one of the most enlightened and humane positivists of the last generation. In his Recollections, published three years ago, there is a final paragraph which runs as follows: "A painful interrogatory, I must confess, emerges. Has not your school held the civilized world, both old and new alike, in the hollow of their hand for two long generations past? Is it quite clear that their influence has been so much more potent than the gospel of the various churches? Circumspice. Is not diplomacy, unkindly called by Voltaire the field of lies, as able as ever it was to dupe governments and governed by grand abstract catchwords veiling obscure and inexplicable purposes, and turning the whole world over with blood and tears, to a strange Witch's Sabbath?"[11] This is his conclusion of the whole matter.