
“Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.”
Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 77
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
“Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.”
Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 77
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: ... the quality that arouses most surprise in Thomism is its astonishingly scientific method. [... ] Avowedly science has aimed at nothing but the reduction of multiplicity to unity, and has excommunicated, as though it were itself a Church, anyone who doubted or disputed its object, its method, or its results. The effort is as evident and quite as laborious in modern science, starting as it does from multiplicity, as in Thomas Aquinas who started from unity, and it is necessarily less successful, for its true aims as far as it is Science and not disguised Religion, were equally attained by reaching infinite complexity; but the assertion or assumption of ultimate unity has characterised the Law of Energy as emphatically as it has characterised the definition of God in Theology. If it is a reproach to Saint Thomas, it is equally a reproach to Clerk-Maxwell. In truth it is what most men admire in both — the power of broad and lofty generalisation.
Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.3 The Embryonic Meme
"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)
In a letter to H. P. Bremmer (Dutch art-critic and buyer of his paintings), Paris 29 January 1914; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 75
1910's
Protesting against the Allies' decision to hand South Tyrol back to Italy; letter to The Times (22 December 1945), p. 5
1940s–1950s
Source: The Matter Myth: Towards 21st-century Science (1991), Ch. 1: 'The Death of Materialism', p. 9
“For, though in science much contained be,
In special cases practice more doth see.”
Stanza 152 (tr. Richard Fanshawe); the poet advising King Sebastian of Portugal, then eighteen years of age.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto X
Context: Great Sir, let never the astonished Gall
The English, German, and Italian,
Have cause to say, the fainting Portugal
Could not advance the great work he began.
Let your advisers be experienced all,
Such as have seen the world, and studied man.
For, though in science much contained be,
In special cases practice more doth see.