"The main issue now is to promote rather than to humble reason. Religious thought will not so much have to defend itself against philosophical (critical) reason, as at the time of the Enlightenment, as it will have to defend philosophical (ontological) reason both against sheer irrationalism or a metaphysics of despair and such ultimate fruits of rationalism as pseudo-scientific positivism and dialectical materialism."
-- Jacques Maritain, "A New Approach to God" (The Range of Reason, p.94)
"Thus it is that when a man has been really awakened to the sense of being or existence, and grasps intuitively the obscure, living depth of the self and subjectivity, he experiences, by virtue of the inner dynamism of this intuition, that love is not a passing pleasure or a more or less intense emotion, but the root tendency and very meaning of his being alive. He becomes both an 'ontological' and an 'erotic' man; his man anew."
-- Jacques Maritain, "A New Approach to God" (The Range of Reason, p.92)
"The opportunity is now given for that reconciliation between science and wisdom for which the human mind thirsts. What is needed first and foremost is a rediscovery of Being, and by the same token a rediscovery of love."
-- Jacques Maritain, "A New Approach to God" (The Range of Reason, p.87)
"Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good."
—Freya Stark, Perseus In The Wind: A Life of Travel
"In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?"
-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"Do not fall into political bibliolatry; in particular, do not regard Kirk's Works as written by one endowed with the prophetic afflatus... Alas, no small book, or big one either, has been written to tell us honestly and practically what to do about all these modern problems, nor will one such ever be published, not even by a conservative author."
-- Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, p.47
"The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal."
-- Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, p.28-29
Jacques Maritain, "No Knowledge Without Intuitivity," in Untrammeled Approaches, trans. Bernard Doering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 345-348.
"Finally, with regard to the second degree of abstraction, the one that is proper to the mathematical sciences, I have a prefatory remark to make first. Up to the present, when I spoke of the intuitivity of the mind, I always added: the intuitivity of the mind turned toward the real because what I was first and foremost concerned with was philosophical knowledge. But in the case of mathematical sciences, it is not toward the real but toward beings of reason that the mind and its intuitivity are turned. Separated from from corporal substance [346] and from the world of sensible experience by an abstraction which, this time, isolates its object from the real and recasts it in an idealist manner, extension and quantity actually constitute for thought a multiform noetic universe set apart, which infinitely overflows the conditions proper t the world of matter such as it exists in reality and such as our senses and our intellect lay hold on it at the first degree of abstraction.
This multiform and teeming universe, not of existing things, but of pure objects of thought, on the one hand is constructed by the mind with regards the manner in which it takes form beginning with the abstraction which draws out the first principles of things, and at the same time is independent of the mind with regard to its properties (some basic quiddity or basic definition having been first freely posited, constitutive of some branch or other of the mathematical sciences) because this is a universe of pure rational necessities. The ideal entities which compose them have their own consistency and their own structures that are just as firm, and their own laws which are just as inflexible as those of the real world; so that if it is true to say that the mind freely causes them to appear before it, it is equally true to say that they unveil themselves to the mind that explores them. It is as if from the ocean of the imagination, the intellect, with a wave of a magic wand, causes islands to emerge or archipelagos or mountains covered with eternal snows, which have no existence except as ideals or as pure objects of thought, which the mind sets itself to scrutinize. There are no sciences freer than the mathematical sciences, which in a sense create their own objects (as is the case with art), but they are not forms of art, they remain sciences, whose truth consists in conformity, if not to existing things, at least to pure objects of thought which, once their ideal existence has been posited, depend solely on that ideal existence for their entire logical development and all their properties. This is a type of knowledge that is completely foreign to physics (since it is concerned with a purely ideal object), but which is a marvelous instrument of physics...
But let us leave all that aside. What I consider essential to notice here is that, at the second degree of abstraction, the intuitivity of the mind—turning [347] its attention this time not to reality (even if by means of the imagination) but to this or that system of ideal entities which the mathematical imagination gives rise to—here too, plays a fundamental, indispensable role in knowledge.
And since there is a question here of ideal systems which, however consistent they may be in themselves, are created by the mathematical imagination, is not our concern here above all with an intuitivity of the artistic or aesthetic order? Intregetas, consonantia, claritas: integrity, consonance or harmony, splendor or clarity, is it not because he is in search of these three elements typical of beauty, to which his soul is interiorly attuned, that the mathematician suddenly sees a principle of intelligible fecundity and intelligible organizing power open up to his particular science new avenues of approach to a higher synthesis?
Here, I find perfectly sufficient the testimony of an eminent scholar in a mathematical area for which, despite my incompetence, I have a particular reverence: topology, which Leibniz, who conceived the idea, called analysis situs (much later Riemann won for it its scientific status), and which studies the relative positions of geometrical entities, not by means of nubmer and measurement, but solely in their qualitative properties or their "ordered relationships."
'The first essential bond between mathematics and the arts,' wrote Marson Morse, 'is found in the fact that discovery in mathematics is not a matter of logic. It is rather the result of mysterious powers which no one understands., and in which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake, and pulls it down to earth, no one knows how. Afterwards, the logic of words and of form sets the pattern right. Only then can one tell someone else. The first pattern remains in the shadows of the mind.'
[He goes on citing examples of Poincaré and Gauss.]
[348, Morse continues... 'The creative scientist lives in the "wilderness of logic" where reason is the handmaiden and not the master. I shun all monuments that are coldly legible. I prefer the world where images turn their face in every direction, like the masks of Picasso. It is the hour before the break of day when science turns in the womb, and, waiting, I am sorry that there is between us no sign and no language except by the mirrors of necessity. I am grateful for the poets who suspect the twilight zone.'
You will notice that mathematical intuitivity is not poetic intuitivity, for in the latter, it is the subject and the object, the self of the poet and the world which are revealed together to the mind [to understand aright, see his Art and Scholasticism, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, and The Situation of Poetry], whereas the intuitivity of the mathematician is of a wholly objective order, as is the case with the intuitivity of the mind in any knowledge properly so called..."
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Le Réalisme de la Principe de Finalité (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1932), 203. (My translation)
"The works of God are more beautiful than we can put into words. We cannot come to know them in the intimate depths, inasmuch as they are knowable and inasmuch as the Creator knows them. Let us guard the sense of mystery, which gives us a sense for the grandeur of the Divine Intelligence, and let us admire the chiaroscuros that the Divine Intelligence has placed in all things—where there is a transition from one order to another, the highest degree of the inferior order attains in a way (secundum quid) to the lowest degree of the superior order, from which, of its nature (simpliciter), it nevertheless remains immensely distant. Mystery is found precisely in the reconciliation of these technical terms of the scholastics—secundum quid (i.e. from a certain point of view) there is a conjunction; but simpliciter (purely and simply speaking) there is an immeasurable distance."
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Le Réalisme de la Principe de Finalité (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1932), 187. (My translation)
"Whatever certain philosophers may think about it, common sense is good not only for farmers and tradesmen. Socrates and Aristotle thought that it is useful for philosophers themselves and that to break with common sense is to break with the first principles of natural reason."
