Carl Lotus Becker
Carl Lotus Becker was an American historian. He is best known for The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), four lectures on The Enlightenment delivered at Yale University. His assertion that philosophies, in the "Age of Reason," relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit, has been influential, but has also been much attacked,
Cornell has recognized his work as an educator by naming one of its five new residential colleges the Carl Becker House.
“We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.”
Carl Lotus Becker
“Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.”
Carl Lotus Becker
“Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.”
Carl Lotus Becker
“Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.”
Carl Lotus Becker
“All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.”
Carl Lotus Becker
“Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.”
Carl Lotus Becker
“Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.”
Carl Lotus Becker