Erwin Edman taught philosophy at Columbia University during the early part of the 20th Century.  His essays and poems convey the best of intellectual thought produced by the 2500 years from the ancient Greek philosophers to the 1920s.  He was well aware of what physical scientists were discovering about the nature of the universe, and this was folded into his personal philosophy.  Some of the following quotations only make sense from a reductionist perspective.

Sample quotations:

"It is not simply that the glitter of false gods is distracting the contemporary from his characteristic intellectual and aesthetic interests, but that the currency of these themselves is being debased.  The very essence of intelligence is discrimination.."  p 13.

"Poets, beginning with Ecclesiastes, have bewailed the devouring mouth of time which consumes all things..." p 13.

"Time, by whose indeterminate future we were to save ourselves, turns out to be the river in which those constantly vanishing moments we call ourselves must drown.  From these and similar awarenesses the contemporary, though he would shun the expression, is looking about to be saved."  p 14.

"There is one embittered or ensoured group who have indeed thought themselves beyond the traps of any new scheme of salvation.  The modernists in cynicism, scepticism and despair have thought that by a complete disillusion they could at least save themselves from ever again being taken in.  'We prefer' writes Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch at the conclusion of his The Modern Temper - 'to die as men rather than to live as animals.'"  p 18.

"...there has grown up the remarkable faith that what men once left to God they can now attain of their own disciplined and controlled action."  p 20.

There are those ... who despairing of the world that the war has left us, bemoaning the change in a civilization that seems ultimately to consist in nothing but change, have tried to retreat to some indefeasible realm, as snug and sure as a protected harbour, as certain and eternal as a traditional Paradise.  These have to go back to Plato or to Hindu philosophy for their salvation. ... Only by giving up the whole world of existence may they save their own souls, become the pure disinterested spectators of what always is and ever has been. ... There are others who will not thus retreat to Platonism, but  the Platonists cannot feel happy in the contemporary world.  They are homesick for what is dead, nostalgic for a heaven of which the cultures, languages and traditions of the past are echoes and memories." p 20.

"Man is a puny accident in a meaningless machine of a world, and at the very highest he can enjoy the grim business of nursing in his samll corner of a careless cosmos a set of ideals which, though generated by that system, that system does not care in the least about.  Man can at best warm himself for a brief moment at the fated small fires of his own ideal amidst the cold, gloomy and universal, of the solar system.  And what ever little achievement of the beauty that is form, of the insight that is truth, of the harmony of living that is goodness man may achieve and incarnate in matter and in life, all this (this is the chilling guarantee of even the latest astronomers) is doomed to an ultimate extinction, a final cataclysm of a heatless planet, when the sun's vanished heat will have ceased to warm the race whose achievements these cherished things are."  p 30.

"More distressing still is the fact that there cannot be detected in it a presence, eternal in its duration and always contemporary in its sympathies, that once, for previous generations - and a forgotten large number in the present - went by the name of God.  It is clear enough that most sophisticated writers have not much direct concern with God or any remote belief in his existence.  But they are, nonetheless, in an inverted way, concerned with him.  They are subterraneously obsessed with the fact of his absence and all that absence implies."  p 31.

There comes a certain time in the life of a child when he sees an adult cry for the first time, or first perceives that a grown-up can be wrong or helpless or stupid.  He discovers, in short and in fact, that there are no adults to be respected or adored, or, what is more to the point, depended upon.  Something not dissimilar is the situation of the children of the 19th Century grown up into the 20th.  They find that this God whom they have read out or presumed to be read out of the universe has carried with him into oblivion any discernible direction of things, any significance of life or any logic of destiny.  Along with the incubus of religion they have rid themselves of its sanctions and consolations.  They do not long for God but they look for something to fill the black spaces that his departure has created.  They are atheists troubled by the consequences of their atheism, unbelievers wishing there were at least at least something else to believe.  One of the reasons that disillusion has become a cult is that where there is nothing credible left, one can at least vaunt one's own unswerving disillusion."  p 31

"It is assumed with, I think, demonstrable falsity, that to be free of traditions, is to be exhilarated.  But to be free is to be not simply liberated from bonds but robbed of comforts, and purloined of supports.  To have a fixed, though humble place in an established order, to be able to act calmly with reference to one code assumed (because one has never known or dreamed of another) to be reasonable and good, these are the rewards of acceptance.  They are rewards which few moderns know. ... Emanicpation has brought them perpetual unrest, not perpetual freedom "  p 35.

"Quarrel as one will with the herd, one needs some herd, however small, for moral warmth.  And the small herd of disillusionists have nothing but doubt to offer each other."  p 36.

"...it has come to be the astringent fashion to see even less in the admirable actions or in the images of contemporaries than in those of our predecessors.  It is as if there were a gritting of teeth and a sardonic determination not to be taken in.  It need not be argued nor need cases be cited to prove that there are, both among the obscure and the famous, instances of genius, of insight, or suffering, endurance and courage in our time equal to those of any past generation.  For it is the ironic belief of a by no means negligible portion of the contemporary intellectual class that the case is rather to be reversed.  Did we but have all the facts, we should find that the greatness of the past is but the sentimentalism of distance and the pathos of ignorance." p 39.

"It is easy enough as a parlor trick of dialectic to dissolve the human ego into nothingness, a moment of sensation which in itself may be an illusion.  ... The psyche may be a myth, but practically speaking, one can act as if the self were real, and one does."  p 40.

"It is impossible to take oneself very seriously if one's most ambitious and generous undertakings are reduced to the lecheries of a monkey or the pulings of a child."  p 42.

"It is the last word in intellectual nonchalance to believe that 'not many fine, not many learned, not many noble' exist in the world or ever have existed. ... Nobody will ever be able to say to them that they had been fooled...If they expect nothing, then nothing can surprise or impress or depress them."  p 43.

"The disillusionist smiles when he is told that if he were properly absorbed he would not be unhappy.  He takes that to mean simply that he would be too busy to think, but that thinking would lead him inevitably to his lugubrious conclusions."  p 44.

"In the patriarchal society of the last two thousand years, a man's life was ... defined by his place as a son or a father... The family, the city, the country, and... the church... helped determine the contours of life and give it continuity, richness and depths.  One by one those supports have vanished.  Men are still husbands, fathers or sons in biological fact; they are still technically citizens, ... But the vital energizing that comes from these relationships ... has vanished.  The springs of emotion and of action from these deep traditional sources have dried up.  Men have attained individuality [my emphasis], they have broken away from the family, the city, the state and the church.  Man has grown into an an individual, and the individuality has turned out to be meaningless, futile, bare and confused.  The modern soul has, as it were, become an old bachelor, uninspired by ties of family, without any country or creed and not even the waning excitement of the senses or of a career to stimulate, encourage and refresh him."  p 48.

"There is no cult to celebrate the efficacy of human action, human will and human deliberation upon the course of natural events..."  p 53.

"With freedom from old prejudices has risen a crop of new complexes; one has been released simply from old dogmas to new uncertainties. ... The soul has escaped into the open sea, and the first result is that it has become seasick."  p 67.

"The faith in the technique of intelligence has been reduced from the hopeful engineering toward a regenerated earth to a fevered technique for relief from the unbearable strain of an unregenerated one.  It is the beginning of the end of the belief in the perfectibility of mankind.  Retrospectively considered, then, each of the great fields in which the faith in intelligence has flourished has successively been found wanting.  Its naivest form was the assumption that mastery of things, resulting in comfort, luxury, variety of goods and quick communication, could produce individual and universal happiness.  It had been forgotten that long ago Marcus Aurelius desperately remarked that even in a palace it was possible to live well." p 68.

"No one loved life more than the Greeks of the great period nor is there any literature that is so impatient and so sad at the inevitability of death.  We, like the Greeks, have no hopes of another life, and there is nothing in the promise of creative intelligence to bring us a victory... over extinction."  p 70.

"It has been said endlessly and patiently that the discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one, or indeed many, as many as his own life, circumstances and impulses generate."  p 74.

"To exist is to be doomed first to corruption and ultimately to extinction."  p 79.

"Only those who are completely absorbed or completely happy or very young, forget time."  p 80.

"To be born is to be on the road to dying... To be at all in the sphere of space and time is to be fated to extinction."  p 93.

"The Platonist has a ... prejudice against all that is and all that changes.  To the lover of truth..., form is necessarily set, fixed and timeless."  p 93.

"The Platonist is indeed today what he always has been, an Epicurean hugging his selected immediate sensations and intuitions and trying to promote them to eternity.  All we are ever given in experience, he reflects, is the sharp cutting edge of the present, and these successive presents always vanish into irrevocable pasts.  Then surely he has the temptation, and in his own eyes the logical right, to save of each present what can never be lost, its eternal quality, its indestructible because purely timeless form.  It is upon this realm of essences that the Platonizing imagination in our time has come to brood.  What is there, is there forever, subject to no vicissitude of change, of history or prophecy.  Shining and implacable, each essence is forever what it is.  ... But even the time-enslaved mind in a shifting society may behold eternities, and immortality may, for a brief span, be experienced even by mortal man."  p 95

"The ancient Platonist knew fairly definitely ... what forms and essences constituted the Heaven of Ideas.  They were varieties of Truth, Goodness and Beauty...  But contemporary Platonism has escaped from even such a noble narrowness in eternity.  The realm of essences for the modern Platonist is the realm of all, of infinite, possibility.  Not only all that has ever been incarnate or apprehended, but all that may be conceived or imagined has inhabited, will inhabit, eternally inhabits, this timeless domain.  This constitutes its glory, its beauty, and, what is from the point of view of these studies in contemporary salvation most important, its consolation. What matter those vicissitudes and transformations which trouble those spirits intent upon the enterprises at once precarious and futile of this confused and hasty age?  There is a blessed infinity of possibilities residing still untouched and unspoilt and perhaps never to be realized in that calm expanse of the infinitely possible.  Here the imagination can travel widely and serenely, for nothing can ever happen in those Elysian fields beyond events.  What does it matter how limited and mean appear the changes and chances of the actual present to those who always have recourse to the infinite that mind can explore or poetry imagine?  Here there is neither success nor failure, disappointment nor surprise, only a still unravished field of intuition.  This mess of contemporaneity, so soiled, so fluttering and vain, is but one of the incarnations, poor and infinitesimal, of those innumerable worlds which might just as well have been realized had the order of nature, the structure of man, the course of history been a little different.  Here is at once Nirvana and fulfilment.  Here by one device one can attain emancipation and peace.  The emancipation is from a slavish submission to things as they happen to be.  The peace is that of absorption in forms, lovely, strange or terrible, but immutably and aseptically what they are.  Contemporary Platonism yields at once the joy of sight and the resignation of insight. In the realm of essence, the mystic and aesthete are one.

It may indeed be said that this new Platonism is a new and austere kind of aestheticism.  Stoicism and Epicureanism become one.  Its psychotherapeutic value lies first in that it is, or gives the appearance of being, a complete escape from time.  To it a thousand years or a single day are one, and one of the chief stings of contemporaneity, that it is contemporary, vanishes.  One exists here and now, but the Heaven of Ideas is one's home.  The new Platonist lives in the intuition of an essence, or a form; whether it exist or be merely imagined makes no difference. Life becomes for him a listenmg to an eternal music.  His listening may be disturbed by the tawdry noises of the world about him, but he knows the music is always there to be heard or to be played.  And while he is listening, he is one with that melodious eternity, and completely oblivious of the discords of the present, the sadness of the past or the ominousness of the future. Life is like a perfect chord perfectly sustained and accurately heard.

We may be the witnesses of the twilight of a civilization, but here it no gotterdammerung, only the clear and calm language of the gods, engraved for everlasting.  Among these half proud, half melancholy Olympians even the pleasures of the senses and the enjoyments of society are valued as instances of immortal essences, as lyric moments in mortal time.

There is about all this a high and pure enjoyment, an Epicureanism singularly fastidious and clean. But there is about it also a Stoicism, not unmingled with irony and pity. Even the best of worlds or the happiest of lives must vanish, and we are not living in the best of worlds or leading the happiest of lives. But by giving up the love of the actual, always crass, slavish and compromising, and always bound to be disappointing, we become free men, sure at least of a quietistic happiness, and insured against any possible frustration, 'loving too much to be ever imprisoned, understanding too much to be ever in love.'

Our standpoint is not that of now or even of ourselves, but that of eternity.  It is quality, not duration, the essence and not the accidental power or even existence of things by which we are impressed.  The present is loved only for what, disappointedly beheld, it reveals, the past for such memorial forms as we may now behold in it, the future for such patterns as it suggests to this given moment of vision.  Whether we live briefly or at length, we may live as if we were living forever.  And though we are hemmed into this narrow nook of time, we can see with the eyes of all those who in any age saw beyond it, sharing eternity with those who have anywhere or in any century shared it.  We are one with Buddha, Plato, Dante, Emerson and Shelley.

Next to this lofty abdication of the actual, there seems, especially to the Platonist, a vulgarity about those preoccupied with the present order of things... and with a future which in its turn, too, must be a present and doubtless a disappointing one.  Science and the Machine, Progress, Evolution, Nature -  they are all grand enterprises or grand words, but they are nothing to the realm of infinity, and will vanish to nothing in the realm of eternity.

Half of this flight is the flight of the aesthetic, half of it that of the ascetic.  Schopenhauer long ago found in the still Palace of Art a salvation, though a temporary one, from the restless claims of the will.  And Art meant for him, too, a realm of eternal forms.  It is enough, and, it would appear, true enough, to suggest that the sources of this flight lie where they have always lain in such enterprises, in a discontent with and a contempt for the actual.  It is sweet to dream of possible, impossible and indestructible worlds, when the present one is a nightmare, as awful as it is temporary.

It is also easy enough and possibly equally true to suggest that the escape is a Pickwickian one.  At least the actual remains actual and still importunate, the future with its tantalizing possibilities and hopes and threats lies as insistently there as ever, the past is not simply a vision to be held but a heritage to be reckoned with, utilized, and modified, but inexorably there.

There is hardly any fear that Platonism will become a very widespread philosophy or practice.  It demands too great sensitiveness and too great disinterestedness to become a very popular mystery religion, though Christian Science and Mind Cure are ragged versions of it.  Its sole danger is that it will delude its own votaries.  As long as it is realized that the intuitions of eternal things are the subtle preoccupations of an animal and mortal creature in an actual and changing world, the preoccupation has its own austere recompenses and justifications.  It is releasing to dwell on that realm of possibility which the mind may ingenuously discover or the imagination glamorously invent.  But these possibilities are purely speculative and metaphysical.  They do not affect, the Platonist would be first to admit it, the course of the actual, though their contemplation may take away its sting.  It is emancipating in a society given over to romanticism and subjectivism to have a philosophy arise once more that asks to behold things not with reference to ourselves or to the future but under the perspective of eternity.  But the contemplation and the release have a human origin and a social condition.  It may be well to withdraw and see things, however anguished, tempting or exciting, as mere examples of eternity.  But that withdrawal is a withdrawal and a momentary soliloquy. The skylark, however high it flies, however heavenly its song, has a mortal body from which its song arises and an earthly home to which it may and must return.  Its song occurs, moreover, always in a present moment of time.  The Platonist sings of his essences, bodiless, gleaming and eternal, here in the third decade of the twentieth century, and Western civilization as it now is, is his home.  He may fly from it, as others have fled in imagination from other civilizations.  That flight may constitute his own self-hypnotic salvation.  But it will not save many, and if ability to face the actual is a part of salvation, it leaves the Platonist himself unsaved."  pp 95-101.

"Get out of the way of Justice.  She is blind."

"The safest refuge from the present is the past."  p 105.

"What is one to make of an age or to do in it when there is nothing in the miscellany of schools of art and winds of doctrine to depend on but one's own taste, one's own judgement and, if at all possbile, one's own intelligence?"  p 128.

"The essence of modern thinking has been said to be inquiry.  Nut the modern, like the ancient, has peace not in resstless seeking but in finding once and for all."  p 130.

"The day of life seems still short and frosty, and the brief sunlight of the senses still the one indubitable good.  Simple people seem still to know that good, and complex people now try to recapture it."  p 141.

"'Let us go,' said Walt Whitman, 'and live like the animals, not one of whom is respectable or unhappy.'  But it is possible only for an animal to live like one."  p 142.

"The sexual climax may be the 'only bright page in the thin biography of many a human animal.'" p 144.

"The cult of sex is the protest of the complicated trying to be simple, of those made spiritual and delicate. ... It needs only be to be recalled that the body itself is a multiplicity of impulses, that life is a variety of interests and enterprises, to see the pathetic futility of this new phalic fanaticism."  p 145.

"We are breathing,, eating, sexual animals.  But we are laughing and thinking and imaginative animals, too."  p 146.

"Only simple people can lead simple lives.  For others simplicity is itself a complex fraud that fools and hurts those who attempt it."  p 159.

"They are those who having found all pathways blind alleys, decide to pursue them no longer, but to repose at length upon the bosom of God, to be one with the One, alone with the Alone.  True ecstasy is absolute oblivion.  It is a loss of self in a large and comforting whole.  It is an intense peace, a crowded solitude, all doubts becoming meaningless, all distinctions transcended or forgotten.  The child in his mother's womb could not be more completely satisfied than the mystic lost - and saved - in the absolute." p 161.

"Most neo-mystics are not approaching the love of God so much as relpsing into the vast and vague confusions of infancy."  p 162.

"It would be, of course, not simply a hazardous but an insolent enterprise to offer a therapeutic program after having examined with dismissive criticism those schemes of moral salvation now offered by any number of serious and honest and competent leaders of contemporary reflection. The history of thought upon these issues has indeed made it sufficiently clear that any version of salvation is largely the wishful operation of a fantasy, rather than the responsible functioning of thought. ...  It is a fairy tale told in a crumbling civilization or a disordered life to help the teller of the tale to keep up his courage. It is an imperious whistling in the moral dark. ...  It is no use telling certain dreamers that they are merely living a dream.  They may have known it all along and not regarded it, therefore, as any the less beautiful and preferable." P. 167.

"For the born philosopher indeed in any age, comtemplation is the only happiness." P. 168.

"No crop was ever disdained because it was manure that helped produce it."  p 170.

"We work in the twentieth century and dream in the twelfth; we are neighbors to the dynamo and we escape to a marble temple shining on an ancient Mediterranean hill."  p 177.

"The good citizen and the good father have sources of vital restoration at which the libertine and the intellectual may both scoff, but which they scoff at in vain.  When, with the passage of youth, the senses have lost their tang, and when the mind has uncovered the loneliness of those eternities among which it wanders, the father and the citizen will have the inarticulate best of the argument.  No lofty Platonism, no cynical or fastidious Epicureanism can rob them of what they have and what they know.  They will probably regard as superogatory all discussion of the soul and its salvation.  As far as they are concerned they will be right." p 181.

"It is possible as occasional instances even in our society would appear to indicate, to find salvation in this world and in this present age of the world. The elements of happiness are precisely what they always have been. They range from the youthful pleasures of the senses to the wide sweep and contemplations of the mind. The chief value of the senses, and particularly of sex, may be said to be the glow they shed on the whole of experience and the stimulation they give to the least sensual of enterprises or absorptions. ... To be aware of the "sensuous surface of experience" is with acute appreciation to have become aware of the present."  p 183.

"For most men and women, even those who pride themselves on being intellectual, the whole colour of life becomes intensified and the meanings of life become more clear and enriched, when they are shared..." p 186.

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