Historical Determinism Is A Recipe

It Is Easy To See Why A Diversity Of Cultures Should Confront Power With A Problem. If Culture Is About Plurality, Power Is About Unity. How Can It Sell Itself Simultaneously To A Whole Range Of Life Forms Without Being Fatally Diluted?

To Claim That Science And Religion Pose Different Questions To The World Is Not To Suggest That If The Bones Of Jesus Were Discovered In Palestine, The Pope Should Get Himself Down To The Dole Queue As Fast As Possible. It Is Rather To Claim That While Faith, Rather Like Love, Must Involve Factual Knowledge, It Is Not Reducible To It.

Reading Is Not A Straightforward Linear Movement, A Merely Cumulative Affair: Our Initial Speculations Generate A Frame Of Reference Within Which To Interpret What Comes Next, But What Comes Next May Retrospectively Transform Our Original Understanding, Highlighting Some Features Of It And Backgrounding Others.

The Most Common Mistake Students Of Literature Make Is To Go Straight For What The Poem Or Novel Says, Setting Aside The Way That It Says It. To Read Like This Is To Set Aside The ‘literariness’ Of The Work – The Fact That It Is A Poem Or Play Or Novel, Rather Than An Account Of The Incidence Of Soil Erosion In Nebraska.

The British Are Supposed To Be Particularly Averse To Intellectuals, A Prejudice Closely Bound Up With Their Dislike Of Foreigners. Indeed, One Important Source Of This Anglo-saxon Distaste For Highbrows And Eggheads Was The French Revolution, Which Was Seen As An Attempt To Reconstruct Society On The Basis Of Abstract Rational Principles.