Sunday, January 31, 2016

Either, or...

T.S. Eliot, quoted in a Weekly Standard review of his collected prose:
Man is man because he can recognize spiritual realities, not because he can invent them. Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma: you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist. If you remove from the word ‘human’ all that the belief in the supernatural has given to man, you can view him finally as no more than an extremely clever, adaptable, and mischievous little animal.
Edward Short,"The Eliot Shelf: Old Possum’s prose is gathered together," Weekly Standard, Feb. 8, 2016, p. 37.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. I will gladly approve any comment that responds directly and politely to what has been posted.