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Updated: June 20, 2025
Hammond led her gradually to the contemplation of some of the gravest problems that have from time immemorial perplexed and maddened humanity, plunging one half into blind, bigoted traditionalism, and scourging the other into the dreary sombre, starless wastes of Pyrrhonism.
As the result of these labours, there gradually arose a Moslem theology and scholastic philosophy as rigid, elaborate, and dogmatic as that of the mediæval Christian West. Naturally, the struggle between the fundamentally opposed tendencies of traditionalism and rationalism was long and bitter. Yet the ultimate outcome was almost a foregone conclusion.
But this is the man all over. Because there is a truth in Traditionalism, therefore, it is the whole and only truth; because metaphysics alone can do little, it is therefore unnecessary and worthless.
With characteristic impetuosity, De Lamennais, like Comte, must bundle metaphysics out of doors altogether as a merely provisional but illusory synthesis, necessary for the human intellect in its adolescence, but to be discarded in its maturity; and thereupon he proceeds to erect his system of Traditionalism mid-air, quite unconscious that in clearing away metaphysics he has deprived the structure of its only possible foundation.
And this streak of her father's ascetic traditionalism in Gratian always roused in him a wish to break it up.
Whately, viewed as a noetic, appears commonplace. Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was Hampden. In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the title of The Scholastic Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology, he assailed what had long been the very bulwark of traditionalism.
Instead of Christian morals surviving in the form of humanitarian morals, Christian demonology has survived in the form of heathen demonology. But it has not survived by scholarly traditionalism in the style of Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity according to the advice of Huxley.
It would, no doubt, have been difficult for Erasmus to find in the arid traditionalism which prevailed in the University of Paris the heyday of scholastic philosophy and theology. From the disputations which he heard in the Sorbonne he brought back nothing but the habit of scoffing at doctors of theology, or as he always ironically calls them by their title of honour: Magistri nostri.
He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, "in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress," etc., etc.
Natural intelligence and cultural preparation are of great service in such tasks. Still more valuable perhaps is the intuitiveness of rare great minds, their traditionalism and their inherited qualities. This must not however be construed to mean that the masses are not to be allowed to exercise any influence on the life of the state.
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