On Social Science

Therefore, dear Ben, in this year when radio, movies, picture magazines, and full-page ads work around the clock to tell us that we are all free, all advanced, all scientific-spirited, all liberal, all alike—please forgive me (a miserable crank) if in my private pantheon I respectfully set your bust aside and replace it with one of your contemporaries, a very contrary soul named William Blake.

It was he, and in the same year that you died, who warned us that “Newton’s Particles” would yield the Common Man. It was also he who despised prudence and uniformity, and was not afraid to tell us that “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”; and that everything—not just material progress, but “everything that lives, is holy.”

RW

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Richard M. Weaver

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Therefore, dear Ben, in this year when radio, movies, picture magazines, and full-page ads work around the clock to tell us that we are all free, all advanced, all scientific-spirited, all liberal, all alike—please forgive me (a miserable crank) if in my private pantheon I respectfully set your bust aside and replace it with one of your contemporaries, a very contrary soul named William Blake.

It was he, and in the same year that you died, who warned us that “Newton’s Particles” would yield the Common Man. It was also he who despised prudence and uniformity, and was not afraid to tell us that “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”; and that everything—not just material progress, but “everything that lives, is holy.”