At the End of an Age -John Lukacs

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"The materialist philosophy and theories of the nineteenth century were hardly more than one chapter in the history of Science, even though its consequences are still all around us, blocking our vision. Physics has ended by explaining away matter itself, leaving us with an ever increasing skeleton, a more complex but essentially empty scaffolding of abstract mathematical formulae. Meanwhile evidences accumulate of the intrusion of mind into "matter." We need not hatch our way through the verbal jungle of "post-modern" philosophers of the twentieth century, even while we recognize their, long overdue, rejection of Objectivism. Unfortunately for so many of them this means but a supermodern kind of Subjectivism, which is a very insufficient approximation of the reality that the key to the universe is mind, not matter."    (131)





"...this book is not about myself. It is not autobiographical. Yet these introductory remarks are unavoidable. About this unavoidability I cannot but cite a great Hungarian Catholic poet, Janos Pilinsky, who wrote how he had been inspired to recognize this condition by reading St. Augustine and Simone Weil: "There are the personal, the non-personal, and the collective areas of life. One cannot reach the non-personal except from what is personal; from the collective, never. Something must become personal first; after that one may go forward to what is no longer personal."

All living beings have their own evolution and their own life-span. But human beings are the only living beings who know that they live while they live --  who know, and not only instinctively feel, that they are going to die. Other living beings have an often extraordinary and accurate sense of time. But we have a sense of our history, which amounts to something else. "The question of scientific knowledge" is the title and subject of my next chapter; the presence of historical knowledge is the title and subject of this one. Scientific knowledge, dependent as it is on a scientific method, is by its nature open to question. The existence of historical knowledge, the inevitable presence of the past in our minds, is not. We are all historians by nature, while we are scientists only by choice."    (49-50)


"The past is very large, and it gets larger every minute: we do not and cannot know all of it. Its remnant evidences help: but they, too, are protean and cannot be collected and recorded in their entirety. Thus history is more than the recorded past; it consists of the recorded and the recordable and the remembered past. The past in our minds is memory. Human beings cannot create, or even imagine, anything that is entirely new. (The Greek word for "truth," aletheia, also means: "not forgetting.")  "There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us," C.S.Lewis once wrote."    (52)






"....The failure of materialism, and of the bourgeois standards of an age, opened up a spiritual and intellectual vacuum which after 1930, and also in our times, was due to be filled somehow. The unpredictable and surprising rise of National Socialism, its attraction, including its attraction to some very intelligent people between the two world wars, was due not only to the dislike or even fear of Communism, but also to the disillusionment with the materialism of the international capitalist order (or disorder), and with what seemed to be an antiquated and hypocritical and corrupt liberal parliamentary order (or disorder). National Socialism was a new third force, youthful and vital, the opposite of anything "reactionary,: attractive to many young people. Sixty or seventy years later, in spite of the accumulated evidence of Hitler's brutalities, such inclinations continue to exist. International Communism is gone; but there are few reasons to believe that the post-capitalist and post-bourgeois materialism of an American type inspires or will continue to inspire many young people throughout the world. Once more a new kind of ideology may fill what is unquestionably a spiritual and intellectual  vacuum. The rise in the historical interest in and occasional attraction of National Socialism and of Fascism is but a minor symptom of this. Whether here or there, a reemergence of national socialism (though not in its most brutal Hitlerian form) might fill an ideological vacuum I cannot tell. but the appetite exists: and it exists, often, alas, not only in many kinds of national hatreds but in all kinds of unrestricted spiritualisms, belief in mystical faiths, involving more and more beliefs in the existence of supernatural and superterrestial phenomena (perhaps especially in the Western Hemisphere). We must not (cannot) regret the slow but inexorable decay of categorical rationalism and of materialism; but aware we must be of the grave dangers and sickening irrational appearances of idealistic determinisms of many kinds.

In any event - due to the evolution of consciousness (which is probably the only evolution there is, the Darwinian theory of "evolution" being part of it, and not the converse) the intrusion of mind into matter increases. In other words, we are facing the gradual spiritualization of matter, many of the results of which are still unpredictable and even unimaginable, good or bad as they may be - but surely bad when abd if the spiritualization of matter devolves into a false idealism."    (183-5)