The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers

I know it is the custom to call the thirteenth century an age of faith, and to contrast it with the eighteenth century, which is thought to be preeminently the age of reason, since eighteenth-century writers employed reason to discredit Christian dogma, a "rationalist" in common parlance came to mean an "unbeliever" (8).

…the Summa Theologica, surely one of the most amazing and stupendous products of the human mind (10).

What is man that the electron should be mindful of him! Man is but a foundling in the cosmos, abandoned by the forces that created him. Unparented, unassisted and undirected by omniscient or benevolent authority, he must fend for himself, and with the aid of his own limited intelligence find his way about in an indifferent universe (10). English "enlightened" Spanish argue the most important consequence of this revolution is that we look about for any semblance of the old authority, the old absolute, for any stable foothold from which to get a running start.

Accepting the fact as given, we observe it, experiment with it, verify it, classify it, measure it if possible, and reason about it as little as may be. The questions we ask are "What?" and "How?" What are the facts and how are they related? If sometimes, in a moment of absent-mindedness or idle diversion, we ask the question "Why?" the answer escapes us. Our supreme object is to measure and master the world rather than to understand it (17).

Theology in the thirteenth century presented the story of man and the world according to the divine plan of salvation. …But in the succeeding centuries, men turned more and more to an investigation… …the mass of irreducible brute facts thus accumulated, the theological vision of man and his world faded into a pale replica of the original picture (17).

As history has gradually replaced theology, so science has replaced philosophy (20).

The rise of history and of science were but two results of a single impulse, two aspects of the trend of modern thought away from an overdone rationalization of the facts to a more careful and disinterested examination of the facts themselves. (20).

Gallileo… did not ask what Aristotle had said about falling bodies… He applied… the scientific method. He dropped two weights (20). Facts are primary… (21).

Mindful: So long as we can make efficient use of things, we feel no irresistable need to understand them. Critic: No doubt it is for this reason chiefly that the modern mind can be so wonderfully at ease in a mysterious universe. (28)

The philosophes demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials (31).