Labor of Love

There's a basic difference in the method of thinking we of today use as against that used a millennium or more ago. It's remarkably hard to spot — because we assume that, of course, everybody always thought this way, didn't they . . .


excerpt

In matters of the intellect it is, nowadays, the fashion to feel a sort of kindly contempt for one's father, rather more impatience of one's grandfather, and mere derisive amusement at all the quaint notions of the generations before them. At the same time, we say that the Greeks had a word for nearly everything, and we patronizingly wonder why the gabby old philosophers could think so clearly and impress our parents as so smart and never arrive at real intellectual triumphs like indoor plumbing and television commercial