The catastrophic temptation

For my own peaceful lot and happy choice;
A choice that from the passions of the world
Withdrew, and fixed me in a still retreat;
Sheltered, but not to social duties lost,
Secluded, but not buried; and with song ..

.. open it where you please. First comes the thesis - ultrum - whether such a thing be thus or otherwise; then the objections - ad primum sic proceditur; next the answers to these objections - sed contra est .. or respondeo dicendum. Pure advocacy! 

And underlying many, perhaps most, of its arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed more scholastico by this syllogism: I do not understand this fact save by giving it this explanation; it is thus that I understand it, therefore this must be its explanation. The alternative being that I am left without any understanding of it at all. True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes that it does not know. It requires a solution.

The distinction between arduous personal faith and ecstatic evangelism is often lost, to hoist another generation on a rack of endless horror. Look to your left, look to your right in its trial - the second fragment cited above is from a martyred Basque Professor of Greek at the most glittering college of Spain - and there is the hideous temptation he describes, in comments on Aquinas. This is the creed of the rabble in control of the American Congress, the present incarnation of the epistemology of Golgotha. What it will wreak upon us we already know. There is no shelter, Wordsworth knew, in any still retreat.

Homo sum; nullum hominem a me alienum puto.


I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger.

ii, Ivan Terestchenko



William Wordsworth,
The Excursion
1814


Miguel de Unamuno
Del Sentimiento Trágico
  de la Vida
J.E. Crawford Flitch, translator
Macmillan & Co., 1921
Dover Publications, 1954©