“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

Book III, Chapter III
Tusculanae Disputationes – Tusculan Disputations (45 BC)

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.6.

Source: The Veneration of Life: Through the Disease to the Soul (1999), p. 9

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

No. 238 (3 December 1711)
The Spectator (1711-1714)

Illness As Metaphor (1978), ch. 7 (pp. 55-56)
Context: There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the "reality" of a disease. That reality has to be explained. (It really means; or is a symbol of; or must be interpreted so.) For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Of Seditions and Troubles
Essays (1625)