Quotes from Arthur Herman

Nurture, not nature, explained human behavior and institutions.

He is Europe's first liberal in the classic sense: a believer in maximizing personal liberty in the social, economic, and intellectual spheres, as well as the political. But the ultimate goal of this liberty was, we should remember, happiness—which Hutcheson always defined as resulting from helping others to be happy.

Like the boy from the expensive prep school who becomes a drug dealer, or the evangelist preacher who steals from his congregation, Augustine had discovered that simply knowing right from wrong was not enough. What's needed is a deeper emotional commitment to rightness and truth. Augustine saw it coming not from our reason or from our conscious will, which bears the stain of Adam, but from our faith.

Two subsequent Franciscans would use Aristotle to push secular knowledge to new intellectual altitudes Thomas Aquinas never imagined. The first was Roger Bacon. He was born around 1215, the same date as the Magna Carta.

Bacon's curiosity makes him sound amazingly modern, and in many ways he was. But his writings look back as much as they look forward, and the figure to whom he owes his greatest debt is without doubt Aristotle, whom he discovered through his admiration for Grosseteste.5 Aristotle's works unlocked for Bacon a world of scientific investigation, above all a method of exploring the wonders of nature and understanding its underlying principles

In some ways, Bacon also looked beyond Aristotle. First, he believed that no natural or physical science could get anywhere without a firm foundation in mathematics. He called it the "gate and key" to all science.

Yet we should remember that the Covenanters were inspired less by their love of democracy than by their hatred of Satan.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner

but from their regard to their own interest.

You are only remembered and become famous because of your mistakes. —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

That night, on May 26, 1328, Ockham, Cesena, and another Franciscan companion slipped out of their rooms, mounted horses, and lit out of Avignon for the border. The trio did not stop until they crossed into Bavaria, where the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV was engaged in his own dispute with the pope. They met in Munich, where according to legend William of Ockham said to the emperor, "Defend me with your sword, and I will defend you with my pen." Ludwig accepted the

Luxury employ'd a million of the poor, and odious pride a million more; Envy itself and vanity were ministers of industry; Their darling folly, fickleness In diet, furniture, and dress, That strange ridic'lous vice, was made The very wheel that turn'd the trade.

the pursuit of our own self-interest actually causes us to reach out to others.

At its heart, Roger Bacon's vision of science owes a great deal to the Neoplatonist inheritance or even Saint Augustine. For Bacon, it was the inner light of reason that stirs our desire to unlock the mysteries of nature and art, including the divine light around us: one reason Bacon was so fascinated with the science of optics.

Rather, it was more beneficial, and ultimately more rational, than ones put together by politicians or rulers, who are themselves creatures of their own passions and whims.

he explained why American leadership was essential to the world. Wilson began by asserting that the Founding Fathers had set up their new nation in the hope that it would "show mankind the way to liberty.

That cannot be said of William of Ockham. Born a few years before Bacon's death in 1294, he carried the Aristotelian legacy of the Oxford Franciscans into direct conflict with the Church's most powerful figure, the pope himself.

Nordau's theories gave a new twist to the question of how man's biological evolution and society's historical evolution intersected. A fourth and disturbing possibility now presented itself: even healthy human specimens living in advanced civilized society would, unless corrective steps were taken, degenerate into a lesser physical and moral type.

Epicurus even defined pleasure as the absence of pain: not exactly a formula for a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Still, the underlying principle of his philosophy—that the one thing all nature seeks to avoid is pain, and the one thing it seeks to gain is pleasure, and men should do the same—was only an extreme version of Aristotle's theory of knowledge based on our senses.

Far more than Thomas Aquinas or even Bacon, Ockham is the true forerunner of the modern era.

A century after Pisa, the monarchies that had used the arguments of Ockham and the conciliarists to beat the Catholic Church into submission would end up having the very same arguments used against them. A full-fledged theory of popular sovereignty broke surface for the first time in the sixteenth century in the writings of Almain and his colleague John Mair and then more explosively during the Reformation. It resurfaced again in the seventeenth century in authors like John Locke.

If these words have a familiar sound, it is because they are not from Ockham or Gerson, but from Thomas Jefferson. They come from the most influential summary of medieval conciliarist doctrine in its secular form: the American Declaration of Independence.

Even with the eclipse of conciliarism, the fact remained that by 1400, Aristotle reigned supreme in Europe's universities and its intellectual life.

giving up his capacity to love and hate, to create and destroy. At the end of history, Kojève predicted, all the world will become America—a gloomy fate by any French measure.