Heralding the New Enlightenment

Abstract

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Caught as we are within the stream of life, absorbed by its experiential and intellectual currents and eddies, we need a distance from past turns in its course in order to understand their significance with perspective. Instantaneous evaluations and interpretations can only be limited. With some distance from lived stimuli, impressions, we can extricate a movement from its moment. Stepping back from the immediacy of its day, we can search out its not so obvious causes, reasons and, what is even more valuable, can learn from its consequences. In our pondering, those reasons, influences, and hidden sources are brought to our questioning attention. Perspective is also gained from appreciating the long past impacts a movement had, its successive consequences. Just when a movement has spent itself and is set to dissolve into other movements, like the circles made on a surface of water by the impacts of stones thrown upon it, we can trace its approximate lineage.