touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Light after light goes out, fire after fire is extinguished. And this gathering darkness has been the work of Science. That is the paradox. The Christians had a very clear picture of things. The simplest peasant could take it in and the subtlest schoolman could spend a lifetime interpreting it. It was simple and permanent. But then Science came along and substituted something difficult and provisional. Decade by decade the picture became more complicated and shorter lived—until now neither the learned nor the simple at all know where they stand. And it is thus that Science puts out the lamps of reason; it is thus that Science is a vast softening process, a vast clearing the way for world-wide superstition. Science offers no fixed points of belief. And Science, in the popular mind, is the sphere of the unaccountable and the marvelous. . . . The Scientist is always there, and he is nothing more or less than the old Magician.
—Michael Innes
The Daffodil Affair (1972)
— Nature — Commonplaces #168 — May/June 2023 —
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