No opinion should be held with fervour. No one holds with fervour that seven times eight is fifty-six, because it can be known that this is the case. Fervour is only necessary in commending an opinion which is doubtful or demonstrably false.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, September 05, 2013
Fervor
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), "Voltaire's Influence on Me," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 6 (1958) 157-162, quoted by Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 209: