Indeed nothing is more difficult than to put oneself outside the age in which we live, and to make an impartial estimate of the fundamental ideas on which our civilization rests. For we are ourselves part of that which we are attempting to criticize, and we can no more separate ourselves from the all-pervading influence of our social and intellectual environment than the eye can separate itself from the light through which it receives all its impressions.
"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).
Pages
▼
Thursday, August 04, 2022
Difficult
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), Progress and Religion: An Historical Inquiry (1929; rpt. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), p. 15: