Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied 'gems'-thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity-and their consequent challenge-in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.

Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted-for the constraint of a definite 'thing' cedes direct…

We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading fro…

Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [:] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search…

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: - the most cruel in pro…

Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all bran…