Spokesman of His Age

A very few men are born to be the prophets of their age. For others, it is enough to be its spokesmen. Harold Taylor of Sarah Lawrence College must be accounted among the latter.

Indeed, there is a sense in which Dr. Taylor might be called the Voice of Mid-Century America. Like one of our great rivers, he is continuously renewed from the countless streams and rivulets of our intellectual and moral life. The Utopian rhetoric, the moral passion, the positivist belief in the total adequacy of science, the Humanist faith in the perfectability of man—in short, the sum of those traits Eric Voegelin attributed to the Gnostic intellect, are found unalloyed in the youthful person of Harold Taylor.

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George Gent

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A very few men are born to be the prophets of their age. For others, it is enough to be its spokesmen. Harold Taylor of Sarah Lawrence College must be accounted among the latter.

Indeed, there is a sense in which Dr. Taylor might be called the Voice of Mid-Century America. Like one of our great rivers, he is continuously renewed from the countless streams and rivulets of our intellectual and moral life. The Utopian rhetoric, the moral passion, the positivist belief in the total adequacy of science, the Humanist faith in the perfectability of man—in short, the sum of those traits Eric Voegelin attributed to the Gnostic intellect, are found unalloyed in the youthful person of Harold Taylor.